A ¿War about the Latinos? So goes Florida primary

They want our votes, yet don’t seem to have a clue how to really reach us.

GINGRICH: Mocking Mitt



I couldn’t help but think that thought upon learning of the campaign back-and-forth taking place Wednesday between Republican presidential hopefuls Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

I’M SURE THEY think they were trying to get the support of my ethnic brethren. Yet all that really seems to have happened is that the two candidates seemed determined to gain the support of other voters without seeming to be pro-Latino.

In short, Wednesday will be one of the days whose activity will be used as evidence as to why these candidates were incapable of gaining legitimate support from Latino voters.

For the record, Gingrich – who has tried in recent years to make himself appear to have an interest in growing the number of Latinos who back the GOP – engaged in rhetoric meant to mock Romney.

He said that some suggestions Romney has made that would supposedly encourage people in this country without U.S. citizenship or a valid visa to leave on their own is a mere fantasy.

ACTUALLY, HE REFERRED to it as an, “Obama-level fantasy.” Gee, tying the Romney name to the Obama name.

It does nothing to make Latinos think Gingrich cares about our interests. He’s just trying to make the ideologues despise the thought of Romney as the Republican presidential nominee all the more than they already do.

ROMNEY: Invading Cuba?

If anything, it means he’s willing to use us as the negative part of the “punch line” to try to get himself a few more votes in the upcoming Florida primary elections.

But Romney showed he’s capable of using the same tactics. He claims that Gingrich’s efforts in recent years to take an interest in Latinos is nothing but pandering.

THEN, HE ENGAGED in some pandering of his own toward the Miami exile community that likes to think South Florida is just an extension of Havana – the way it was some six decades ago.

Just as we had a “drug czar” to oversee programs meant to reduce the spread of illegal narcotics, Romney says he would create a “czar”-type position to oversee our potential future relations with Cuba, and perhaps the rest of the nations of Latin America.

In his words, this person would promote freedom throughout the region. Which, to me, is rhetoric bordering on the ridiculous!

Because it strikes me as being more about trying to one-up people, compared to the rhetoric that Barack Obama used during the ’08 election cycle with regards to Cuba.

OF COURSE, THE ideologues despised that rhetoric because it implied he would want to seek some sort of real relationship with the Caribbean island nation – rather than the implication being given by Romney – who also made comments in Miami that had some people wondering if he was implying the possibility of a military strike if he gets elected.

His rhetoric was vague. But if he really is thinking such thoughts, that ought to be enough reason to vote against Romney for president.

Anybody who can’t accept the failure of the Bay of Pigs attempt at a Cuban invasion  some five decades ago would only be driving this country into a bigger debacle if they were thinking of some similar, 21^st Century-style plot.

Let’s only hope THIS amounts to little more than campaign trash talk, to be forgotten as soon as possible after the Tuesday primary in Florida – which is about the only place in the country that might show even the slightest interest in such talk.

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