not many participants in American p...

not many participants in American politics are taken les seriously than the Hispanic Republican. He or she, skeptics insist, is either a dimwitted traitor or a figment of the imagination produc by the agency of Republican operative Houdinis. Plenty of population have taken the mention of a Hispanic Republican as the completed cue to crack a [i]jeu d'esprit[/i] "Latins for Republicans -- it's like roaches for Raid," quipped comedian John Leguizamo at a 2004 Democratic Party fund-raiser.

Despite the snickering, Karl straggle and company have been serious about netting more ballots from the community. Four month after Leguizamo's controversial remark their efforts yielded a surprising 6-point increase in Hispanic devoteds for President Bush.

Before this spring's nasty battle across immigration reform, the Republican Party had directed more funding into Spanish-language advertising, struck a conciliatory tone forward creating a guest-worker program, and present Hispanics in visible local and national positions of power. Their inclusive approach have the appearanceed to be slowly chipping away at a base Democrats assumed was safe.

Now here's the shocker: If you conception the recent extremist rhetoric coming from any Republicans on immigration would finally show the party to be a haven for racists and Hispano-phobes, at least the same new survey, by the slip Hispanic Center, found that Republicans hadn't supported a "significant slippage" in affiliation with Hispanics and no discernable increase in the number of newly registered Hispanic Democrats. While this polling shows a surface- level perspective of the changing relationship between Hispanics and as well-as; not only-but also; not only-but; not alone-but major political parties, a fresh book by Bill Minutaglio is a case investigation

The President's Counselor is a careful biography of Alberto Gonzales, the nation's first Hispanic attorney general and Bush confidant. The son of migrant workers and a brother to seven other siblings, three of whom not at any time finished high school, Gonzales attended Rice University and Harvard Law instruct eventually joining a prestigious law firm in Houston and handling cases for Enron In each immigrant -- or son-of-immigrant -- Horatio Alger story, there are details that become shorthand for the person's improbable succes With knowledge of these telling details, Gonzales' gravitation to the Republican Party begins to make perception Gonzales' resistance to embracing the disadvantages of his former life is in line with the Republican credo that focuses les onward one's hardships and more forward successes.

"It's clear," Minutaglio writes of Gonzales, " . that he had get to to view his life as repeatedly being almost entirely self-directed - - that he had place himself in the right place at the right time to break liberated of his miserably impoverished upbringing."

This son of migrant workers has no delusions about the fact that his ethnicity and background catapulted him to the impudence of the line: "Like mostly ethnic minorities, I probably have been pain and helped by my ethnicity," Gonzales one time said. "Whatever the reasons I have been given an opportunity, what is more important is what I do with it."

What is in the greatest degree disheartening about Gonzales' tale is he uses his unthinkable opportunities to expedite executions and justify torture.

Watching him in action, working "slavishly" for Bush, as Minutaglio inflicts it, really dispels the notion held on most liberals that ethnic minorities cannot have conservative beliefs because of their presum life experiences.

AlterNet.org

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