I think the answer is no. Nearly all of the Republicans would not participate in the Univision debate((If you don’t know, Univision is a Spanish language network; however, the debate was conducted in English.)), and now they are ducking out of a debate on minority issues hosted at Morgan State University by African American commentator Tavis Smiley. Here’s a summary:
Arizona Sen. John McCain, former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney have declined to participate in the Sept. 27 debate at Morgan State University. “I feel good,” Smiley said, about the odds of getting former Tennessee senator Fred Thompson. Five candidates trailing in national and state polls will be there.
The Univision debate, co-sponsored by the University of Miami, was scheduled for Sept. 16, but canceled after only one candidate — McCain — accepted. “We’re looking for a new date,” said Univision spokeswoman Rosemary Mercedes. However, Romney and Giuliani already have declined.
Republican campaigns blamed scheduling conflicts for their candidate’s absence from the Baltimore debate, citing, for example, a McCain speech on Iraq and a flurry of fundraising events before the third-quarter deadline on Sept. 30. All eight Democrats participated in their PBS debate at Howard University — and that was on June 28, a similarly frenetic fundraising period.
Kevin Madden, a Romney spokesman, said his candidate has “a very heavy travel schedule” that has led him to decline invitations to several debates.
Florida Sen. Mel Martinez, chairman of the national party, has said GOP candidates are not snubbing Hispanics; they are just busy with other campaign events.
Smiley said he intends to press his case tonight on NBC’s Tonight Show with Jay Leno. “We’re talking about one 90-minute conversation,” he said. “It gives these Republicans a wonderful opportunity. They complain all the time that black and brown voters won’t give them a chance. We offer a platform on PBS.”
Republican presidential candidates typically receive less than 15% of the black vote in general elections and tend to oppose policies important to some minority voters, such as affirmative action. Right now they are competing for conservative primary voters.
You have to wonder–is this 1900 or 2007? How can any reasonable person snub entire constituencies like this? We not talking about just two events. Only Tom Tancredo agreed to appear in an NAACP forum in Detroit, and they have rejected other forums oriented towards blacks and Latinos.
This is so pathetic that even a few of their fellow Republicans are chiding them. Check out this article from the Washington Post:
“We sound like we don’t want immigration; we sound like we don’t want black people to vote for us,” said former congressman Jack Kemp (N.Y.), who was the GOP vice presidential nominee in 1996. “What are we going to do — meet in a country club in the suburbs one day? If we’re going to be competitive with people of color, we’ve got to ask them for their vote.”
Making matters worse, some Republicans believe, is that the decision to bypass the Morgan State forum comes after all top GOP candidates save McCain declined invitations this month to a debate on Univision, the most-watched Hispanic television network in the United States. The event was eventually postponed.
“For Republicans to consistently refuse to engage in front of an African American or Latino audience is an enormous error,” said former House speaker Newt Gingrich (Ga.), who has not yet ruled out a White House run himself. “I hope they will reverse their decision and change their schedules. I see no excuse — this thing has been planned for months, these candidates have known about it for months. It’s just fundamentally wrong. Any of them who give you that scheduling-conflict answer are disingenuous. That’s baloney.”
Former Republican National Committee chairman Ken Mehlman urged candidates to “reconsider this opportunity to lay out their vision and other opportunities in the future.”
“Every one of these candidates I’ve talked to is sincerely committed to offering real choices to African American and Hispanic voters, and in my opinion have records that will appeal to many of these voters,” he added.
Mehlman, a longtime aide to President Bush, aggressively courted the minority vote as RNC chairman in 2005-06. He recruited black candidates to run for office as Republicans and condemned electoral tactics that showed hints of race-baiting.
Mehlman’s successor at the RNC was Sen. Mel Martinez (Fla.), a backer of legislation that would allow illegal immigrants now in the country to stay and eventually become citizens.
Except for McCain, the top GOP candidates have distanced themselves from that proposal, which Kemp worries will become another strike against the GOP with Hispanics. Bush received 40 percent of the Latino vote in 2004, but the Republican base remains inflamed about illegal immigration, leading the candidates to focus on border-control proposals.
Some may say, “Why try to court votes that you have little chance of winning?” However, this misses the larger issues. First, this will not only alienate blacks and Latinos. Many moderate whites will find this suspicious, so they risk alienating whites who would like to see the Republican party as non-racist and open to everyone. Unlike their black and Latino counterparts, I think moderate whites will be much more likely to bamboozled by the empty platitudes about reaching out to people of color. The second point is that this is demographic suicide for Republicans. The country is changing, and no matter how many border fences they try to build, they are faced the reality that people are color are going to make up half the population in this country within the next 30-40 years. When you spend an inordinate amount of time lambasting the largest minority group, then you could hurt your party’s future, as this article from the Hispanic Business Journal notes.
Before I end up writing a how to manual for Republicans :) , let me make a few more criticisms. The Republicans know that they have created policies that are harmful to blacks and Latinos, which is why they don’t have the nerve to tell Latinos to their face that want to cut immigration and incarcerate immigrants. They don’t have the nerve to tell blacks that they are fine with the fact that numerous blacks are sitting in jails on drug charges while whites with similar charges go free. If they really believed that their policies are helping people, then they don’t need to hide from people of color and pretend like they don’t exist.
I agree that the Republican candidates should not avoid this. It’s an opportunity for them to make their own case in their own words to the Hispanics in the U.S. Heck, I know little Spanish and there are very few Hispanics that live in my neighborhood, and even I know about Univision.
I’m loath to speculate on why they won’t do this, except to say that I figure “Why spend time on a losing cause” or else pure ignorance about how big Univision’s audience is are the most likely. But I’d like to see the GOP candidates do this and tell the Univision viewers what they’re all about.
Is this really any different than the Fox News sponsored debate which the Democrats refused to participate in? In both cases, it seems like the candidates don’t want to appear in front of a presumably hostile audience.
SamChevre –
I am not sure, but I think that Univision is owned by a Republican, a kind of Latino version of Rupert Murdock. And I do know that the news headquarters of Univision is located in Miami, meaning that it is staffed primarily with Republican Cubans. Except for immigration, the news is actually often slanted in a conservative direction: Most of their viewers are socially conservative, and they were HEAVILY slanted toward keeping Elian Gonzalez in the U.S. So, no, except for that one little issue of “do we want to authorize private militias to shoot poor brown people as they cross into the country looking to work for a living”, Univision is NOT the left equivalent of FOX News.
OK, according to Wikipedia:
Jerry Perenchio (born December 20, 1930) is a former talent agent who owns Univision, the largest Spanish-language TV network in the United States. … He is also a large contributor to the Republican advocacy organization “Progress for America”, having given US$4,000,000 in the 2004 election cycle and another US$5,000,000 in the 2006 election cycle. Election records show over $18mm in donations to Republican candidates, party funds and related causes as of 2006.
I don’t think the Fox News parallel works perfectly. If they rejected Fox because Fox is a white oriented network then it would be an equal parallel. I suspect they rejected Fox because of its politics, not because of the race or racial politics of the viewers.
Furthermore, “minority issues,” which is the theme of the Tavis Smiley debate, is an issue for everybody not just black and brown folks. We’re all in this country together, so the status of blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, Asians, and Middle Easterners are issues that we should all care about. When a politician says, these issues are not even important enough to debate, they are saying they don’t even want to talk about the status of people of color and race relations in this country.
But seriously,
Racial Profiling
Immigration Policy
The War on Drugs (and criminal injustice)
Educational Inequality and Quality
The Mortgage Crisis
Racial Discrimination
these will be some of the subjects they cover, and they are important issues to all of us.Why are they afraid to answer questions about these issues in front of a brown or black audience?
I suspect they rejected Fox because of its politics, not because of the race or racial politics of the viewers.
And I suspect the Republicans are largely rejecting the black forums (this isn’t the only one) because of their politics as well. What’s the point of churning extremely limited campaign time on groups that have expressed 90-10 ratios of voting for the other guys every time?
So Robert, how do you explain Univision? Latinos are predominantly Democrats, but Bush made inroads with Latinos. I guess they gave up or maybe some of them don’t want to stand in front of Latinos and say, “I want to build a border fence.”
Furthermore, the Tavis Smiley debate will not be limited to a black or Latino audience. Anybody can watch it.
Anybody can watch it.
How many of them are US voters who have voted Republican in living memory?
I voted for a Republican once for local government. Does that count?
Actually, I think it works absolutely perfectly.
Fox News is a news network geared to appeal to conservatives. The Democratic candidates, on the whole, don’t care much about conservative issues, so what’s the point of appearing?
The Univision, NAACP, and Morgan State university events are geared to address minority issues. The Republican candidates, on the whole, don’t care much about minority issues, so what’s the point of appearing?
The difference, of course, is that one is political disagreement, and the other is out and out racist, but this shouldn’t be news to anyone.
—Myca
Actually, I agree with the analogy about Fox News to a certain extent. I just don’t care. Now, if opponents of the Republican candidates start to use this as a club on the Republican candidates, I think their supporters should use the Fox News thing to club them back.
But what Democrats may or may not have done and why doesn’t properly define what Republicans should or should not do. I think that the Republican candidates should appear on this because they would have a chance to explain their positions and define themselves as people rather than letting their opponents define them as demons and impute false motives to them.
I was thinking the same thing. The Dems rejected Fox because most people who watch that network probably won’t vote for them anyway–not to mention the fact that progressives couldn’t contain their glee at the Dem’s refusal to attend. Now we have the Republicans who aren’t all that willing to pander to demographic groups that probably weren’t going to vote for them anyway.
I think that the Republicans should have made time to attend these events because I believe they should be attempting to make inroads into the black and latino communities. Black people once voted overwhelmingly for Republicans so I do believe that there is a possibility for this to happen once again, if the Republicans take the challenge seriously.
I would like to point out that the Republican candidate that I’m supporting, Ron Paul, is going to attend the debate at Morgan State. Perhaps he would have agreed to attend the debate on Univision too if almost all of the other candidates hadn’t declined; or, maybe there really is some big event that the Republicans already had lined up where they could energize voters whom they already knew would vote Republican.
Republican Party: point gun at foot, pull trigger.
Repeat until out of bullets or feet.
How many of them are US voters who have voted Republican in living memory?
Dunno, but it includes people who freaking gave W the White House.