Hispanics insulted by Reid’s racists comments

August 12, 2010 03:40


From Florida came the angry response of  Republican Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles. He , told Fox News that Reid’s comments were  “outrageous and ridiculous.”

From The Americano

In politics when all else fails, when your numbers are dropping and those of your opponents are rising, desperate politicians resort to vicious attacks and in recent years they are bringing up the “race card” with increasing frequency.

That is precisely what Senate Majority Leader did in Nevada Tuesday, when he told an audience of mostly Hispanic voters:  “I don’t know how anyone of Hispanic heritage could be a Republican, okay. Do I need to say more?”

Obviously the veteran Senate Democrat fighting for his political life has not been paying attention to the slew of recent polls that say that Hispanic voters, together with independents, are the two groups that are most responsible for President Barack Obama’s decline in the polls.

A recent Gallup poll showed that Obama’s approval ratings had fallen 28 points among Hispanic voters from its 82 per cent peak in May 2009. His 54 per cent rating among Hispanics in July was the lowest of his presidency.

Sixty six  per cent of Hispanic voters cast their ballot for Obama in the 2008 election. If compared to that, his favorable rating among Hispanics in late July was 12 point down.

No matter how you slice the numbers, Obama’s popularity among Hispanic voters has declined significantly. Thus the “race card” from the Senate Majority Leader, who desperately wants to hang on to is seat.

Reid’s racially-charged comments come as the Nevada Democrat is trying to boost Hispanic turnout in his bid for reelection this November. Even then, however, he is swimming upstream. Reid’s positions on immigration are very unpopular with Nevada voters in general.

Reid supports the Obama administration’s lawsuit against Arizona over its immigration law, but 63 percent of Nevada voters oppose the lawsuit, according to a Rasmussen poll. And Reid voted against a measure to complete a 700 mile fence along the Mexican border in May.

While Sharron Angle, Reid’s Republican opponent did not immediately respond to the senator’s remarks, one of her staffers called it “idiotic” in Twitter.

And shortly before noon Angle’s deputy campaign manager Jordan Gehrke responded: “Reid has said he’ll do more if re-elected–apparently that means more insensitive racial comments, more gaffes, more lame attempts to distract from what he has done to destroy the Nevada economy. With that said, I suppose Nevadans should just be glad he didn’t say anything racist about Hispanic people’s skin tone or ‘dialect’ this time.”

The last line is a reference to Reid’s comment that Barack Obama does not have a “negro dialect” Reid apologized to Obama when his remark was published in a book in January of this year.

Reaction to Reid’s comments inundated the web.

A number of people who read his comments pointed out that Reid’s son, Rory Reid, is trailing badly to Republican Brian Sandoval, who happens to be Hispanic, in the Nevada governor’s race. Others brought up the fact that in 2007 Reid proclaimed that the United States had lost the war in Iraq.

From Florida came the angry response of  Republican Florida Senate candidate Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban exiles. He , told Fox News that Reid’s comments were  “outrageous and ridiculous.”

He said that for Americans of Hispanic descent the strongest issue is the “economic power — upward mobility. My parents worked every single day to work to give me and my siblings opportunities that they didn’t have.

“The point is [Reid’s] wrong,” Rubio concluded. “The fundamental issues of this campaign are no different for Americans of Hispanic descent than they are for anybody else: and that’s economic empowerment and the desire to be able to live in a country where, if you work hard not only can you do better for yourself, you can leave your children better off than you were,” Rubio said in his interview.

Hispanic organizations also responded to what they called Reid’s insulting comments.

In a statement from its President, Mario H. López, The Hispanic Leadership Fund said: “The fact is, Harry Reid has accomplished nothing positive for Nevada and has offered little to the Hispanic community except government dependency, radical job-destroying economic policies, and direct attacks on our values exemplified by the taxpayer funding of abortions in ObamaCare.  In fact, Harry Reid even voted for poison pill amendments to kill immigration reform in 2007.”

López added that “Harry Reid wanting to anoint himself as some sort of authority on what it means to be Hispanic is the height of arrogance from an intellectually bankrupt politician.”

Jesse Hernandez, Chairman of ALRA (Arizona Latino Republican Association) told “The Americano”: “I find it sad and disheartening that we as Latinos are still seen as a monolithic group by Sen. Reid instead of the dynamic and diverse group that runs within the Latino electorate. Unfortunately, his comments are part of the continued insulting, racist and completely false theory held by Sen. Reid and the Democrat Party that Latinos are a politically monolithic rabble. It seems that their political approach to Latinos centers around, every four years or so, appeasing poor Latinos with more social welfare programs and lame justifications for not protecting our borders. All in all, Sen. Reid´s misguided comments show his absolute ignorance about the long history of Latinos voting Republican from the times when the Republican Party was born in the middle of the 19th C. until today.”

Two Hispanic congressional candidates also objected strongly to Reid’s comments. Jon Barela, the Republican candidate for New Mexico’s First Congressional District, said ” It is terribly condescending for Reid to take Hispanics for granted – especially as his agenda fails to renew America’s economic promise.”

At a townhall event in Alpine, TX today, Francisco Canseco the Republican candidate for 23rd Congressional District in Texas and the son of Mexican immigrants said that he believes ” that the Senate Majority Leader’s comments are not only offensive but sadly typical of the Democrat mindset in Washington.”



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