The Big Nada

Via BooMan this morning comes Josh Marshall's report on an outfit calling itself "Latinos For Reform".  Sure, there are a lot of political advocacy groups out there trying to influence the elections.  But how many advocacy groups out there can you honestly say are running ads telling Latinos not to vote at all?



BooMan calls this the "ultimate cynicism", Josh Marshall believes it's minority voter suppression, and both are right. I personally can't recall political ads ever being run to tell people not to vote at all, that seems like political nihilism to me. Naturally, that means conservatives must be involved.

The president of Latinos for Reform, Robert Desposada, is a conservative political consultant and political analyst for Univision, but he said the ad is a sincere effort to express Hispanic frustration with the Democrats failure to deliver on immigration reform.

""We're saying what a lot of people are feeling. "It's the only way for Hispanics to stand up and demand some attention," Desposada said, adding that he also couldn't ask voters to support Sharon Angle.

"I can't ask people to support a Republican canddiate who has taken a completely irreponsible and bordering on racist position on immigration," he said.

"Don't vote this November. This is the only way to send them a clear message," says the ad's narrator of Democrats. "You can no longer take us for granted."

Which of course is completely the opposite: by not voting at all, Latinos would be completely taken for granted and would concentrate even more political power in other voters, particularly white ones. If there's anything that the civil rights movement has taught, it's that those without the power to vote have no power in anything else.

It's a bald-faced move to take Latinos out of the political fight. "Give up, surrender." Look, not just Latinos are frustrated with the lack of Democratic progress on immigration, but that still has to be better than the backwards progression that the Republicans guarantee. But no matter what and no matter who you are, if you take the right to vote away from yourself like this, then you have nobody but yourself to blame when things don't improve.

The Republicans backing this effort know this. And they're counting on it.

[UPDATE]  Given the increasingly bad press on this, Univision will not be running this ad.