It’s getting to the point now where anyone interested in political science has to ask: does the Republican Party have a political death wish when it comes to black and Hispanic voters?
Is the big tent shrinking to a pup tent?
Former Tennessee Senator Fred Thompson has become the fourth leading GOP presidential candidate to shun the PBS debate this month at a historically black college in Baltimore, the Huffington Post has learned.
The debates, moderated by Tavis Smiley, will go on as planned, despite the absence of Thompson, former mayor Rudy Giuliani, former governor Mitt Romney, and Sen. John McCain. Each campaign cited scheduling issues as the reason for their absence. Nevertheless, the rejections underscore the consistent absence of GOP candidates at minority voter forums.
“There is a pattern here,” Smiley told the Huffington Post. “When you tell every black and brown request that you get throughout the primary process that ‘no, there’s a scheduling problem.’ That’s a pattern… Are we really supposed to believe that all four of these guys couldn’t make it because of scheduling?”
The Republican front-runners’ snubbing of Smiley and PBS comes on the heels of their rejection of a debate sponsored by the Spanish-language network Univision (McCain was the only GOP candidate to accept that invitation). This past June, only one Republican presidential candidate, California Rep. Duncan Hunter, showed up at the convention of the National Association of Latino Elected & Appointed Officials.“It’s not just that they are not coming. It’s that some of them are visibly insulting us,” Cecilia Munoz, vice president of NCLR, told the Politico.
It’s getting to be a matter of mathematics now.
If the GOP is essentially not trying to woo (and therefore actually irking)
–black voters
–Hispanic voters
–independent and moderate voters
–moderate Republicans (those that still exist)
then what blocs of voters are they going to REPLACE them with?
Is the Republican majority — you know, the one that helped the GOP win control of both houses of Congress in 2006 — so solid that they can decide to snub voters who do not fit the profile of the party’s base?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.