DISSECTING THE HISPANIC VOTE

The surest road to political irrelevance
is to be written off by one party
and taken for granted by the other.

By Ruben Navarrette, Jr.

Conventional wisdom is that the Republican Party has cooked its goose with Hispanic voters for the 2008 election and beyond, not just because it took a hard-line on immigration reform but because some conservatives actually helped lead a debate that became anti-Hispanic.

Many will remember when Colorado’s Rep. Tom Tancredo, GOP presidential candidate and perhaps the most unabashedly nativist lawmaker in Washington, told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, [b]“We are becoming a bilingual nation, and that is not good.â€