Where the Ducks Are
by Patrick J. Buchanan
Tuesday, July 22, 2008

"You go hunting where the ducks are," said Barry Goldwater.

The successor to Barry's Senate seat apparently believes that ducks
come from Mexico and speak Spanish. For in July alone, John McCain
made three separate appearances before Hispanic groups.

Last week, he spoke to La Raza (The Race), where rival Barack Obama
said, "The Latino community holds the election in its hands."

McCain would appear to agree. But are he and the GOP letting go of
the bird in the hand to grab two in the bush, which may not even be
there?

Consider. Though Hispanics are 14.5 percent of the U.S. population,
they will likely constitute only 7 percent to 8 percent of the
electorate in 2008.

Why? A vast share are illegal or recent immigrants who cannot vote.
Hispanic citizens also register and vote in low percentages. And
they are concentrated in New York, Illinois and California, which
are out of reach for McCain, and Texas, where McCain will win
handily.

Some 14 percent of the vote in crucial Florida is Hispanic, but
Cubans are overrepresented there, and Cubans do not vote like La
Razans.

A mid-July Quinnipiac University poll showed Obama leading McCain
among black voters 94 to 1. Yet, McCain appeared last week at the
NAACP convention.

Now, as GOP nominee, McCain is entitled to court any voters. But
why has he decided to court the hardest of hard-core Democrats,
rather than the Democrats he can win?

Who are they? Though the GOP seems deaf to the message, the
primaries of 2008 fairly screamed out the answer.

Hillary lost 90 percent of the black vote in April and May but
routed Obama in Ohio and Pennsylvania by 10 points, and in Kentucky
and West Virginia by 35 and 41. With almost no African-American
votes, in states where the Hispanic vote is tiny, Hillary crushed
the nominee of the Democratic Party who is McCain's opponent this
fall.

The Democrats who will decide the outcome in November are white
folks living in Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. More
numerous than African-Americans and Hispanics combined, they have
often voted Republican and, as they showed in the primaries, are
wary of Barack, his associations and his attitudes.

McCain may not recognize that this is where the election can be
won, but Obama recognizes this is where the election can be lost.
This is why he has scuttled rightward so fast his liberal base is
in shock.

He has severed ties to Trinity United, defenestrated the Rev.
Wright, come out for the death penalty for child rapists, supported
the Second Amendment right to keep a handgun in the home, put the
flag pin back on and denounced MoveOn.org for the "General Betray
Us" ad.

If Obama believes his vulnerability is with Hillary's Democrats,
why is McCain doing the La Raza-NAACP tour? Why is he not going for
the Democrats who carried Hillary to victory after victory?

How can they be won? The answers lie in the successful referenda of
the past two decades.

On the California ballot this year is a proposition that declares,
in repudiation of the state's Supreme Court, that marriage is
between a man and a woman only, and California shall recognize no
other.

More than 61 percent of Californians in 2000 voted for a similar
law. In 2004, 13 states, including Ohio, enacted -- by landslides
ranging from 57 percent of the vote to 85 percent in Mississippi --
ballot propositions that restricted marriage to men and women.

Barack opposes the California proposition. Why do McCain and the
Republicans not exploit this?

On illegal immigration, it is hard anywhere to find a referendum
that has called for a cut-off in social welfare benefits that did
not pass. That includes Proposition 200 in McCain's own state of
Arizona in 2004, which carried with 56 percent, including 47
percent of Hispanics, over McCain's opposition and that of the
entire GOP congressional delegation.

Ward Connerly of the American Civil Rights Institute has never lost
a referendum. In California in 1996, Washington and Michigan after
that, his initiatives, which outlaw affirmative action -- i.e., any
state discrimination against or favoritism toward anyone based on
race, gender, ethnicity or sexual preference -- usually triumph
handily.

Connerly is fighting the good fight again this year. Why is McCain,
why are the national Republicans, not campaigning with him? For the
primary victims of affirmative action are the working- and
middle-class white Democrats who will decide the election.

Campaigning in Ohio, Barack and Hillary discovered NAFTA is toxic.
Both denounced it. McCain, however, embraced it and told Michigan
voters, "The jobs are not coming back."

Then he went to Canada and Mexico to assure those folks that NAFTA
is sacred writ.

Among the issues on which Republicans can find common ground with
Democrats are language, borders, culture, affirmative action,
re-industrializing the nation and retention of our sovereignty.

Neither La Raza nor the NAACP is likely to be of much help with
this agenda.

SOURCE: http://buchanan.org/blog/2008/07/pjb-wh ... ducks-are/