WHERE ARE ALL THOSE MEXICANS? | 2000-11-11
Do you remember Bush's Mexican Convention, the one that included the first speech to a national convention in Spanish? Do you remember all those Hispanic voters who were going to turn out and give California to Bush?
Nobody else does either. For a while there, the media could speak of nothing but the coming wave of Mexican votes for Bush. But when the real election day approached, everybody forgot about it.
So who gets credit for the increased Republican presidential vote? The answer, said the media, was a group to which the networks have given a brand new name. I saw it splashed across the screen on network TV.
They called it "The White Christian Right." Sounds like the Klan, doesn't it?
What a coincidence.
It is the first time I had ever seen that label. Apparently it was conjured up just for Election Night. I forget whether it was used by CBS or CNN. Or both.
But it turns out that the Mexicans did not pour out to give the "inclusive" Republican Party their support.
The reason Bush did so well, said the media, was because he got over 90% of this "White Christian Right," while his father and Dole had gotten less than 80% of it. In other words, after selling out for all those minority votes and liberal votes, Bush got a basic Republican vote, and little else. It was his gestures toward conservatism that won for him.
Once again, this was the opposite of what the media predicted.
The press called Bush's post-South Carolina campaign, "The Bob Jones Redemption Tour." As always, they said he had to go left and win all those Hispanics who were just panting to support him in California.
But in the end, it was his rightward shift to win South Carolina away from McCain that saved his base for him.
The press -- always unanimously -- gave an equally absurd analysis of why Republicans lost California. It was, they said, because Republicans had earlier sponsored popular initiatives to take public services away from illegal aliens and to abolish bilingual education. Both those initiatives won overwhelming majorities in California. But the media unanimously agree that the Mexicans who were against them on those initiatives would have voted for Bush this time if Republicans hadn't sponsored them.
Let's translate this into English. The media declares that the people who embrace bilingual education are natural Republicans. They say that the kind of Hispanics who are more worried about their illegal brethren than they are about American taxpayers would actually have trooped over to Republicanism this time.
It's insane when you state it that plainly, but all the media agree on it.
It's weird how liberals can state the most insane propositions, but they only look as ridiculous as they are when somebody translates them into straight talk. And if a conservative spoke plain English, he couldn't be respectable, so the liberals get away with it.