The confusion that can doom them

I have engaged in many rants in recent months about how the Republican candidates with dreams of becoming U.S. president may be doomed because of their occasionally hostile and often condescending attitude toward the nation’s growing Latino population.

The GOP has candidates who would thoroughly enjoy being able to appeal to the nativists of our society. Yet those candidates also have to find a way to temper their rhetoric because they don’t want to turn the Latino electorate against them so intensely that they wind up putting Barack Obama back in the White House.

IT MEANS THAT except for the nitwit candidates who don’t care, and are unlikely to take the nomination anyhow, there is a delicate balancing act that has to be done.

We have candidates who try desperately to say things, hoping that only certain types of people are listening. Then, they say something else to the other group.

Such as the case of Mitt Romney these days, who is getting praise (in some quarters) for the campaign advertising he is doing in Florida en Español. Not that Mitt is speaking Spanish. He’s having his son, Craig, habla en el otra lengua.

We get to hear the usual rhetoric about “American values” and our “national greatness” that the ideologues may think sounds sincere but comes off as so phony that it makes me perceive those people as “anti-American” in nature. The Spanish language doesn’t make it sound any more real.

HIS CAMPAIGN SPOTS also tout the fact that he has the backing of such Cuban exile community politicos as Mario Diaz-Balart, Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen.

All of which I’m sure he thinks is going to make his campaign appeal to the significant Latino population come the Florida primary election on Jan. 31.

Yet these spots, and these appeals, are running at the same time that Romney is campaigning in South Carolina – and going out of his way to lambaste the campaigns of Newt Gingrich and Rick Perry as being somehow “soft” on immigration enforcement (a.k.a., kicking certain types of people out of this country).

As it is, he has his operatives working the state making sure people know that he is supportive of the efforts by the state Legislature to impose Arizona-style laws meant to get local officials involved in enforcing federal immigration laws in ways that comply with their own ethnic, ideological hang-ups.

THAT KIND OF rhetoric is exactly what turns off Latinos – even those whose families have been here for generations and for whom immigration is not a directly-relevant issue.

For we see the way some people would like to apply these restrictions indiscriminately to Latinos in general. It becomes a matter of disrespect, and Romney is trying to appeal to that element of disrespect in South Carolina.

While hoping that nobody in Florida is paying too close of attention. Which is most definitely a headache causer.

Because the fact of the matter is that while we don’t have national elections for president, we do have individual state and territory elections for national office. Which means that whoever gets elected to office ultimately has to be capable of making decisions on behalf of the nation – and not just the parts of the nation they want to favor.

SO WHILE THE political pundits of South Carolina are quick to predict that his tactics there will help his campaign effort in the primary to be held a week from Saturday, those very same words will come back to haunt him elsewhere.

Which could wind up being the reason why anything he’s doing now will be for short-term gain and long-term loss.

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