Dear GOP:

Please, please, please keep attacking the Supreme Court nomination of Sonia Sotomayor.  Whoever in your political party thought it was a good idea to deride the first Latina nomination to the high court is someone you need to listen to on all major strategic decisions going forward.  Under no circumstances should you consider the fact that Latin voters are the fastest growing demographic in the American electorate or that Barack Obama’s thumping of John McCain amongst Latin voters 67% to 31% essentially delivered him The White House.

Instead, continue to make race, of all topics, an issue in a country that increasingly wants to get beyond the divisions of the past.  Keep up the strategy of trying to label a Puerto Rican jurist who grew up in a housing project in the South Bronx and rose on her own merits to the absolute top of her profession a racist for making a tongue in cheek comment about a Puerto Rican woman having more wisdom than a white male several years back.  Allow your talking head commentators like Rush Limbaugh to make veiled racist assaults on Ms. Sotomayor on air without saying anything to rebuke them.  Then watch as the results to your political fortunes mirror those after Republican members of Congress threatened (but failed) to rewrite laws classifying illegal immigrants and anyone who assisted them as felons during the last attempt at immigration reform in 2006.  Your caucus, if you stop to notice, has not won a major national election since.  Back in the 1840’s and 1850’s a similar strategy was taken on by a  long forgotten political party who called themselves the Know Nothings (the name was derived not from the stupidity of their political strategy, but rather the semi-secret nature of their organization - when a member was asked about the party in public, his response was supposed to be “I know nothing”).  Their platform was Anti-Immigration (mainly against Irish Catholics) and they fought tooth and nail, often violently in the streets of Big East Coast Cities (and in my hometown of Baltimore in huge election day riots) to keep “nativists”, or those born on American soil, in power until the bitter end…which came swiftly in about 15 to 20 years.

The Democratic party of the day pursued the same political strategy then that it does now of embracing new immigrants to the country and fighting to expand their rights, in perhaps its only policy  position which hasn’t changed in over 150 years.  It’s been a very successful strategy when you consider that the Democratic party is one of if not the oldest political party on the planet.  Supporting immigration has not only brought economic growth, enthusiastic talent and cultural diversity to America, it has also provided the Democrats a steady stream of new voters with each successive generation.  Once support is established in an immigrant group, new citizens in that community learn from their family and friends to support at the voting booth the party that supports them in the government. Which is how the Democratic party has won the votes of Catholics, Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish, Asian and now Latin American Immigrants over the past Century and a half.

So in the upcoming years, please don’t change a thing, my dear GOP.  Then, ironically, all the contempt your caucus has shown for minorities in the past, looking for the cheap votes of simple bigots, will turn you into the minority party for generations into the future.

XOXO,

JP

LINKS:

Daily Telegraph (UK):  Republicans attack Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor

Boston Globe: Obama promotes Sotomayor, blasts critics

Daily News (NY): Sonia Sotomayor sparks GOP vs. GOP spat over Gingrich, Limbaugh ‘racist’ allegations