Before the 2006 midterm elections, chances looked good that Republicans would be kept in office by a Republican leadership approach of benign neglect of banking and finance, admiration of a growing income gap between the rich and the middle class, low personal savings, high public deficits, unreported war costs and a promise of incorporating migrating populations into our nation's workforce.
After all, George W. Bush had received unprecedented Hispanic support (read support for immigration reform) in the 2000 and 2004 elections crafted by Karl Rove. As a student of the 1896 William McKinley presidential campaign, Rove understood how a fundamentally changing economy, immigration and a very diverse national population affect political fortunes.
It worked in 2004, but Republicans needed immigration reform to bring in new members to the GOP base. Already, Ronald Reagan's 1982 reforms had gained sympathetic ears from new citizens and Republicans harvested new voters and a sympathetic hearing for their neoconservative pleadings.
But a wacky portion of the party radicalized the immigration issue. Its members fused it with the fear of terrorism and came up with screwball ideas -- like constructing a 2,000-mile wall and militarizing the U.S.-Mexico border and conducting national dragnets that made our civil servants be perceived as Brown Shirts.
Let's face it. While there's a legitimate problem about transnational migrant workers and families, it assumes an ugly new shape when commandeered into a jingoistic, mostly anti-Mexican, movement.
Now here is the strange part: Those wackos who promoted anti-immigrant dogma through narcissistic screeds on the radio and TV couldn't be heard by Hispanics. They didn't seem to understand that hundreds of thousands of immigrants and Hispanics were listening as they were being publicly demeaned and belittled and their children called deprecating names.
The hate horde thought Latino evangelical ministers didn't know that right-wing radicals were targeting their congregations.
That was dumb.
By 2006, some 270 Hispanic evangelical ministers who saw through the hypocrisy formed the National Hispanic Prayer Breakfast and Conference. Collaboration between Latino evangelicals and Republicans started coming quickly apart.
Catholic social activist Enrique Morones led a national caravan that looped through most major U.S. cities. Word of mouth mushroomed into a national network. In March and April of that year, the nation witnessed the largest pro-immigrant demonstrations ever.
The most vehement no-growth Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives lumped into former Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo's House Immigration Task Force. Many of them began losing elections in 2006 and again in 2008. Others prudently retired from office. Republicans became a minority party.
Late last month, CNN's Larry King, working on the moment's hot topic -- Mexico's war against narcotraffickers -- invited Edward James Olmos, Sam Quinones and Tancredo to comprise a discussion panel on national immigration policy. An actor, a writer and the discredited congressman are a motley crew, to be sure.
Tancredo could not even stay on topic. In some bizarre way, he was trying to make immigration and the U.S. drug-use market into a single problem. It sounded like a comedy team that ran out of jokes. Not even xenophobia works anymore.
Why? Because the fringe elements would rather endanger the two-party system instead of compromising for a reasonable, sensible solution that would give the Republican Party room to grow. Instead, the present confining rancor and ruinous ideology is doing it in.
A befuddled, rudderless Republican Party needs to lighten up and get new leaders. If not, it becomes the party of the nuts, the political fringe, and the Washington D.C. chapter of the Minuteman Project.
(Jose de la Isla writes a weekly commentary for Hispanic Link News Service. Contact him at joseisla3(at)yahoo.com. For more stories, visit scrippsnews.com.)
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, http://www.scrippsnews.com)
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