Hispanics should play Race Card on Romney over Fast and Furious

The wooden Mitt Romney is benefiting from both good campaign strategists / response team and Obama campaign gaffes but he's still not inspiring enthusiasm.

Mike Allen at POLITICO writes about what Romney must do to inspire Republican voters. Conspicuously absent from Allen's piece, in which he says Republican strategists think Romney should "go big," is any mention of Fast and Furious. Interestingly, Romney's handlers seem to be very concerned about his ability to connect with Hispanic voters.

On the more practical side, Republicans worry about everything from his failure to connect at all with Hispanic voters to an unexpected drain in conservative enthusiasm if the Supreme Court kills the Obama health care plan. “Obamacare is the one permanent and potentially irreversible [effect] that Obama will have on the country, and if it is overturned, it makes the election, by default, less important,” said a conservative operative intimately involved in the campaign who has reviewed extensive polling and focus group research on the topic. “If the court overturns it, 10 million conservative activists suddenly breathe a great sigh of relief, and may not be quite as intensely active.”

On the Hispanic question, the numbers for Romney are bleak: An NBC/WSJ/Telemundo poll, released on May 23, showed Obama with a 2-to-1 lead among Hispanic voters, Obama, 61, Romney, 27.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) took his advice straight to Romney during a recent fundraising swing in New York. Cantor laid out the raw numbers: 60 percent of key independents are women, and a disproportionate number of independents are minorities. Republicans “have to be able to connect” with women and minorities, Cantor said.

Tell me again, how many Hispanics are dead today as a direct result of Fast and Furious?

Just last month, Sipsey Street's Mike Vanderboegh seemed to indicate that Speaker John Boehner may be preventing Darrell Issa from issuing the contempt citation to Eric Holder over Fast and Furious out of fear that the black Attorney General could play the race card.

Whether or not that's true remains to be seen but what IS true is that there seems to be a tepid appetite for going after Holder over an operation that is responsible for hundreds of dead Mexicans (Hispanics).


If Romney is seeking to connect with Hispanic voters, why is he not pointing to the rising number of Hispanics murdered with guns that were placed into the hands of bad guys by the Obama administration, in the name of gun control? If he were to do so, Romney would be way ahead of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus (CHC), which has yet to see one member demand accountability from Holder. In fact, by doing so himself, Romney could point to the CHC while asking Hispanic voters one simple question:

"Where are the leaders of the Congressional Caucus that claims to put your agenda first?"

In fact, if Romney DOESN'T go after Holder over Fast and Furious, he risks being labeled as even more insensitive to Hispanics than initially thought. It will have meant that he is more interested in playing politics than in doing the right thing and actually benefiting from it politically. If the Republicans are not going after Holder over fear of the race card, it's the quintessential example of a 'glass is half empty' mentality. Hispanics should be playing the race card on Romney for NOT going after Holder on Fast and Furious.

So which is it, Mitt? Are you going to prove Eric Holder right or are you going to do the right thing?