House Latino?

House Latino? - Evangelical Outpost brings us this ugly, stupid flap from California:

First, there was singer and Democratic activist Harry Belafonte calling Colin Powell a “house slave.” Then we have Hillary Clinton making a really bad (and unfunny) joke about Ghandi and a gas station. Now we have a Dean supporter and official with the DNC getting in on the act:

Steven Ybarra, a Democratic National Committee official and regional coordinator of Latinos for Dean, called Rosario Marin the former U.S. treasurer under President Bush who is now seeking the GOP nomination to compete against California Sen. Barbara Boxer, a "house Mexican for the Republicans." The attack was sent out in a mass e-mail to political activists, community leaders and a number of journalists this week.

Marin responded in a statement:

Apparently, according to Mr. Ybarra and many of his fellow Democrats, if you are not a liberal Democrat, then you shouldn't be considered a legitimate minority. It doesn't matter that I'm an immigrant, the daughter of a janitor and a seamstress, or that I had to teach myself English because my first language was Spanish."

No Ms. Marin, for the Democratic Party it doesn’t. To them a "legitimate minority" is one that is sympathetic to their cause. The Democrats' idea of diversity is only skin deep.

< Vic Romano on > Right you are, Joe. < / Vic Romano off >

When it come to race relations, Democrats still flip off the odd smug glare - "we were the party of civil rights" - as if:

• a forty-year-old piece of legislation gives the current generation of Democrats a hereditary claim to be racial-equality crusaders
• the Voting Rights act would have passed at all, in those days when Southern Democrats still smelled the gunpowder from the Civil War - wthout massive Republican support (when in fact a higher percentage of Republicans voted for the VRA than did Democrats

Linda Chavez, in her book "An Unlikely Conservative", tells a fascinating story from her days as a liberal; Chavez grew up in a working-class, itinerant Hispanic family - but, born in America, she spoke English with no accent. When applying for a diversity scholarship in the sixties - one of the first - she found herself losing out to a woman from a very comfortable upper-middle-class background, but who spoke with a thick accent. Diversity, it seems, was best served by outward indicators.

Which brings us back to Joe's story. Party affiiliation is one of the most trivial outward indicators there is. But one can expect no less a performance of Mr. Ybarra - because scenarios like these are the ones that scare the Deocrats the worst. They know that:

• Americans of hispanic descent are very predominantly socially-conservative Catholics.
• Americans of Asian descent are the best examples of free-market idealism and hard, meritocratic work that exist in America today.
• There are no bigger supporters of education reform, including vouchers and creeping privatization, than inner-city Afro-Americans.

So while all these groups vote Democrat, more and more of them are wondering why.

Every Republican I've ever met of African, Hispanic or Asian descent (or, for that matter, ever gay conservative) is in the GOP becuase, in addition to their belief in free markets, law and order and strong defense, they are tired of being treated as an entitlement. One acquaintance - an Hispanic Republican - told me "it's nice to have a party earn my support".

Details of policy changes aside, I hope we can do that.

Posted by Mitch at January 11, 2004 09:01 AM