Bozell Column: Obama's Latino Landslide?

It seemed like someone had been inhaling something at CNN on Friday morning. They kept touting an upcoming interview: “Barack Obama could win the presidential election by a landslide. Op-ed contributor Charlie Garcia tells us how next.”

Garcia, a consultant to corporations on how to market to Hispanics, broke out rainbows and unicorns for Obama: “He’s doing all the right things. He’s basically saying, look, guys, comprehensive immigration reform. I’m all for it. It’s those Republicans that just keep getting in
the way.”

Neither Garcia nor his CNN anchor/enabler, Kyra Phillips, could recall that Democrats couldn’t get amnesty for illegal aliens (“comprehensive immigration reform”) passed when they controlled both the House and the Senate. So much for the canard that it’s the GOP’s fault. How
could he promise he can do it in a supposed second term, especially if Republicans make further
gains in Congress?

Don’t trouble Garcia with facts. “He wins by a landslide. And I think that the White House knows now that he has it locked. That’s why he’s on the air all time talking to Latinos about the things that are important to them.”

Where does CNN find these guys? Does no one vet them? Garcia was in exclamation-point mode about how Obama granted in interview to Eddie “Piolin” Sotelo, “the biggest radio star in the Hispanic world.....He’s the Rush Limbaugh of the Latinos.”

Garcia said that Obama told Piolin “‘I have five more years and I’ll get it done. He’s feeling pretty cocky and he should. I mean, you can accuse him of a lot of things, but he can count.”

Is that true? Did Obama really go on Spanish radio and claim a Republican Congress would support him? And no one challenged him? He said Republicans have “shown themselves unwilling to talk at all about any sensible solutions to this issue, and we’re going to have to just keep up the pressure until they act."

In his opinion piece on CNN.com, Garcia boasted, “After watching the Republican candidates lock the kryptonite that is the immigration issue around their necks during the Arizona debate, my bet is that President Barack Obama could win another term -- even if he loses key swing states such as Florida, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.”

Losing all those states wouldn’t make for a “landslide.” It will make for a loss.

Garcia told Kyra Phillips, “The President had issues with Latinos...[but] the Tea Party has the Republicans locked in, because they need to pander to the Tea Party to win the primary but they’re not going to be able to pivot back, because Latinos are looking for someone authentic. You can’t all of a sudden in August or September come back to Latino voters and say, ‘Oh I love you. I want immigration reform.’ They’re going to say you’re a phony.”

So how “authentic” is Obama when he sidelined this supposed gold mine of a political issue to sell Obamacare, insisting all the way that his health “reform” wouldn’t cover illegal aliens? In fact, he was openly denounced by liberals for abandoning the issue. “He is the deportation president,” said “undocumented activist” Daniel Rodriguez in Time magazine. Time’s cover carried the words “Yo Decido: Why Latinos will pick the next president.”

This is odd, since whites are still 64 percent of the population. Time and CNN select the Latino vote as crucial because they want to make the Republicans cry uncle on amnesty. Time’s Michael Scherer began his cover story by slamming Gov. Jan Brewer for “the most incendiary
immigration law in the country.”

But who made that law a national issue? The liberal media did. They put all the political pressure on anyone opposed to illegal immigration. It was “incendiary” despite a Rasmussen poll finding 70 percent of Arizonans supported the tougher law. The Obama-obedient media never found it “incendiary” for Obama to announce in 2011 that he was suspending most deportations in a transparently political move.

Take a look at the numbers from the Pew Hispanic Center, which estimated that 69 percent of Latinos voted for Democrats in 2006 and 67 percent for Obama in 2008. But in 2010, that percentage dropped to 60 percent, even though liberals surely tried to make Tea Party “racism” an issue to Latino voters.

Republicans shouldn’t write off the Latino vote, but they can wonder how much of that nine-percent slice of Latinos would switch to Republicans if they Xeroxed the liberal amnesty position. CNN and Time could wonder if Obama will hurt his Latino “landslide” by canceling pipelines and signaling a hard-left position on abortion, gay marriage, and religious liberty. But they’re too busy celebrating and pandering to minority voters as the most crucial, special voters of all.