Holding Our Noses, Latinos Must Vote

You see them on Spanish television every so often, Latinos who claim to speak for the Republican Party, displaying a degree of shamelessness that is truly incomprehensible. They belong to the party that has vilified and persecuted immigrants, yet they tell you that Latinos should be as mad as hell at President Barack Obama and other Democrats for failing to keep their promises to reform our broken immigration system.

They are right about Obama and the Democrats, but they are the wrong people to be saying it. After all, they belong to a party that clearly would be worse for immigrants, a party that has stopped Obama and the Democrats from reforming immigration, a party packed with candidates who use immigrants as guinea pigs to score points with xenophobes. It takes a huge amount of audacity to go on television and pretend to be angry because the Democrats didn't get amnesty for undocumented immigrants while you belong to the party that has turned amnesty into a four-letter word.

When they make these arguments on Spanish-language TV news programs, GOP Latino talking heads usually are able to get away with it. You seldom see anyone questioning their credibility to make such statements or telling them to stop insulting our intelligence.

Perhaps that's what led a group of Latino Republican operatives to think that it could get away with a publicity campaign — radio and television spots in English and Spanish — encouraging Latinos not to vote in the Nov. 2 midterm elections.

The spots were produced by Latinos for Reform, a Virginia-based organization with strong ties to the conservative wing of the Republican Party. The group's Machiavellian scheme obviously was to discourage Latinos from voting for Democrats, who were the primary target of its campaign. Because the group knows that most Latinos cannot see themselves voting for Republicans, it decided — again, with incomprehensible shamelessness — to ask Latinos not to vote at all.

Unlike Latino Republicans' appearances on Spanish-language TV news shows, their "Don't Vote" ad spots backfired — big-time!

Latinos for Reform's scheme has been exposed all over the media. Univision pulled the spots off the air. The group's underhanded efforts to help conservatives — for example, tea party candidate Sharron Angle over Sen.

The group's leader, conservative activist Roberto DePosada, insists his group is going after both Democrats and Republicans, but his ads are almost entirely targeting Democrats for their lack of leadership on immigration. In one ad, he notes that the Republican Party's rhetoric on immigration has been "irresponsible," but he doesn't seem as offended by his party's Draconian measures as he is by the Democrats' inaction on immigration.

Had these spots been more balanced or had they been produced by a group of disillusioned Latino Democrats who finally had found the guts to speak out against the inaction of their party's leaders, wow, this campaign would have been impressive! We would have had to take them seriously.

But coming from scheming GOP operatives trying to fool their own people into helping Republicans by abstaining from voting, it's laughable.

We have seen many voter suppression efforts directed at the Hispanic community in the past, but I don't recall another one that was headed by Latinos.

In a statement opposing the "Don't Vote" campaign for attempting to mislead Hispanic voters, Voto Latino, a coalition of Hispanic organizations, noted that "the American Latino community does not have the luxury to sit this election out."

The coalition also noted: "Voting, no matter your political party or which candidate you support, is the most important civic tool that American Latinos have to be heard and understood by decision makers nationwide. To be clear, only one thing happens when you don't vote. You vote against your interest. Instead, you elect your opponent's interest."

A couple of weeks ago, when I quoted a study that noted that almost half of registered Latino voters are planning to stay home on Election Day and when I expressed the frustration many Latinos feel with the inaction of the Democratic Party, some of my readers assumed that I was advocating voter abstention.

Au contraire! Though this column often has questioned whether Latinos can use abstention as a weapon against Democrats who campaign as our friends and then ignore us, the bottom line is that we have no choice but to vote. Even if the choice is between bad and worse, between phony Democratic friends and Republican hatemongers, even if we have to hold our noses while voting for the lesser of two evils, unless we want things to get even worse for the Hispanic community, Latinos must vote!

To find out more about Miguel Perez and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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