William Murchison
The American Spectator
4/13/2011
Sí, es un problema — y una oportunidad muy grande. Muy, may I affirm?
That’s provided you’re conservative and hopeful of swinging America’s fast-multiplying Hispanic population your way. Not for the cynical, self-serving purpose of stroking Hispanic sensibilities vigorously enough to capitalize on Hispanic votes — the preferred Democratic approach, as we know, regarding black voters. The main idea here for conservatives, I think, is to integrate as many Hispanic Americans as possible into the conspiracy to keep America free of suffocating government regulations and disintegrating cultural norms.
As Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor whose sensitivities proceed partly from his relationships with the state’s large Hispanic population, has put it: “If you believe in the conservative philosophy as I do, it would be incredibly stupid over the long haul to ignore the burgeoning Hispanic vote. They will be the swing voters in the swing states.”…
…a poll more than a year ago asserted that 54 percent of Texas Hispanics call themselves conservative, as against 18 percent who self-identify as liberal or progressive. Maybe so, to judge from how things went at the polls in Texas last November. Four Hispanic Republicans won state house seats in Hispanic territory. Three of the Democratic losers were likewise Hispanic. With the election over, along came Rep. Aaron Peña, a Democrat, to cross over to the Republican side due to what he identified as the overlap of his own views with those of the GOP.
Of particular note, from this same standpoint, was the contest in formerly Anglo-Czech-Slovak Williamson County, home base for Dell Computer, lying just north of Austin, where a Hispanic woman, Diana Maldonado, two years earlier wrested the seat from a white man. In 2010, one Larry Gonzales wrested it back for the GOP. Nobody — Anglo, Hispanic, or what-not — seemed to notice anything but the philosophical and partisan divide between the two candidates. Walloping the Democrats, rather than fretting over ethnic identity, turned out to be the big thing…
Read the entire article at The American Spectator
