Posted, with a running commentary, by Nicholas Stix
Republican group readies immigration blitz
By Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman
February 28, 2013
Politico
While Republican leaders continue to talk – and talk – about how best to update the party’s hard-line image, one of the country’s most prominent conservative outside groups is ready to put real money into the effort.
[The GOP only has a “hard-line image,” because the MSM have lied about it. The Party leadership has long been in complete Hispandering mode, and Mitt Romney promised a mass amnesty of illegal alien invaders to Hispanics, who rewarded him with 27 percent of their votes.]
The American Action Network is poised to launch a major advocacy campaign aimed at winning support for immigration reform [That’s amnesty, amnesty, amnesty, not immigration reform!] on the right – the first significant effort within the Republican coalition to create an atmosphere in which it is safe for GOP lawmakers to support an immigration bill.
[More bull. The GOP repeatedly sought to pass mass illegal alien amnesties under George W. Bush and John McCain. The base, aided by VDARE’s research and reports, successfully fought off the Party.]
AAN officials described the campaign in detail to POLITICO, outlining how the organization aims to drum up support for both immigration legislation and Republican budget proposals in the coming months.
The nonprofit group and an affiliated super PAC, the Congressional Leadership Fund, spent a combined $55 million on advocacy and electioneering in 2011 and 2012, officials said. With $44 million of that total coming from AAN – a number that hasn’t previously been shared – the group can expect to have substantial resources for its policy messaging going forward.
The immigration effort will begin this weekend with a six-figure television buy featuring former Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez urging voters to support fixing “a broken system.” It is branded as a message from the Hispanic Leadership Network, an arm of AAN that has spent several years reaching out to Hispanic voters from the right.
Ridic. HLN is merely more reconquistas riding the gravy train of cheap labor Republican amnestisiacs. They’re not reaching out to “Hispanic voters,” right, left, or center.]
The campaign represents a political gamble, though one that could alter the current dynamic of immigration reform. Florida Sen. Marco Rubio has been the party’s most outspoken advocate for an immigration proposal, but it remains to be seen how receptive the larger conservative community will be to enacting a compromise law.
[Rubio has little Hispanic support. He is a creation of the cheap labor lobby. And what “compromise law”? This compromise ploy is also old hat. When Cong. Mike Pence supported amnesty back in 2006-2007, he also lied, in calling it a “compromise.”]
The Gutierrez commercial will run nationally in both English and Spanish, on programs including ABC’s “This Week,” “Fox News Sunday” and the network Univision. There will also be a digital component to the advertising in targeted markets.
“America’s the only place where a little boy who couldn’t speak English can grow up to be a CEO and U.S. secretary of Commerce,” Gutierrez says in the ad.
“Washington must pass immigration reform that grows the economy and respects the rule of law.”
[How does legalizing tens of millions of foreign invaders in nation where the unemployment/underemployment rate is 23 percent “grow the economy”? How does amnestying tens of millions of criminals “respect the rule of law”? Paging George Orwell!]
In interviews, AAN leaders described the push for immigration reform as a long-term commitment on the part of the organization. [Of course. The organization is a cheap labor front whose sole raison d’etre is to get a mass illegal alien invader amnesty passed, after which it will be disbanded.] AAN’s think-tank affiliate, the American Action Forum, plans to put out a study in March, authored by former Congressional Budget Office head Douglas Holtz-Eakin and emphasizing the potential economic benefits of immigration reform. [It is impossible for any honest study to show any economic benefits of an amnesty. Heritage’s Robert Rector showed several years ago that an amnesty would cost Americans $2.6 trillion. However, inflation alone would hike the cost to $4 trillion, and Rector’s conservative numbers vastly underestimated the costs to begin with.]
Strategists said that Gutierrez is only the first HLN supporter who will be featured in television ads; the group’s national advisory committee includes other Republicans as prominent as Jeb Bush and Nevada Gov. Brian Sandoval. (Gutierrez recently resigned from a senior position at Citigroup to helm a super PAC focused on immigration.)
[Jeb Bush is one of America’s leading traitors and racists. He does the bidding of his anti-American, reconquista, racist wife, Columba.]
AAN president Brian Walsh said the focus on immigration reflects “our desire to see this problem solved and a real bill make it through the House and the Senate this year, or at least this Congress.”
“We will be tapping into our grassroots, we will be tapping into the leadership we’ve built over the last few years [for] what we believe is going to be a very difficult debate moving forward, but one that we feel strongly about,” Walsh said.
[The “grassroots” he’s talking about are the business-owner felons who hire illegal alien invaders, and daily commit immigration, labor, social security, and tax crimes.]
AAN advisers said that immigration represents a longstanding area of interest for the group, which plans to orient itself over the next year toward that issue and the ongoing fiscal battles on Capitol Hill. Dan Conston, AAN’s communications director, said they anticipate those will be “the defining issues of the next six to eight months, and probably past that.”
On fiscal and economic issues, AAN has been aligned closely with the Republican leadership on Capitol Hill. The group has played a front-line in past election cycles making the case against the Affordable Care Act [Obamacare], and for GOP proposals like the Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan’s budget plan.
AAN has already conducted polling on the next round of budget fights and plans to activate supporters around the next Ryan-authored deficit reduction plan.
Unlike other independent-spending groups on the right, which have been dedicated overwhelmingly to running television commercials, AAN has committed real resources to building up both policy resources and activist-oriented grassroots [astroturf] outreach. AAN officials estimate they now have a following of some 350,000 people who can be activated through email or social media.
In 2012, AAN spent heavily to create a “National Grassroots Network,” that ultimately included offices in eight states and engaged activists to knock on some half a million doors and contact over 2.1 million voters.
AAN’s leadership views those sympathetic voters [Who are they kidding? GOP voters are overwhelmingly opposed ot any illegal alien amnesty!] as a possibly potent tool for applying pressure on Capitol Hill. Conservative groups have often struggled to mobilize voters to contact their members of Congress, as Democratic groups such as labor unions do routinely – and as the holdover organization of the Obama campaign, Organizing for America, has indicated it plans to do in 2013 and beyond.
“I don’t know who else in this town can say they’re a more House-focused organization with hundreds of thousands of people at their disposal to start working for them,” Walsh said. “The fiscal situation is going to cast a shadow on every single public policy debate that’s going to go on for the next two years … This is where the fight is going to be.”
The new AAN initiatives reflect both the group’s strength coming off the 2012 cycle [The GOP gets beat again, and this group is strong, coming off the election? What’s wrong with this picture?], and the persistent weaknesses in the larger architecture of the Republican Party that center-right elites are eager to address. [No, they’re eager to obfuscate and sandbag]. As a registered nonprofit, AAN does not have to disclose its donors; the CLF super PAC does disclose and received money in 2012 from pillars of the Republican donor community such as gambling magnate Sheldon Adelson, Texas homebuilder Bob Perry and the oil company Chevron. [My emphasis.]
Of the various conservative outside groups – American Crossroads, Americans for Prosperity and others – AAN may have had the best night on Nov. 6, when Republicans comfortably held onto the House of Representatives, where AAN and CLF trained their efforts.
In the months since then, the Republican Party has entered the early stages of a struggle to address the shortcomings that the 2012 campaign put on vivid display.
Chief among those are the party’s grievously weak performance with nonwhite voters, and the failure of presidential nominee Mitt Romney and other GOP candidates to articulate an economic message that appeals to ordinary people.
[The Party will never attract non-white voters. The only chance it has is to stop the country from becoming non-white.]
AAN – and more specifically, HLN – took an early lead in that process by releasing a raft of polling showing that Hispanic voters view the GOP in intensely negative terms, and arguing that an immigration solution is a necessary first step toward building a more diverse voter base.
Longtime Republican fundraiser Fred Malek, who co-founded AAN with former Minnesota Sen. Norm Coleman, said that the GOP is “increasingly viewed as intolerant and insensitive” to Hispanic voters.
[Norm Coleman is a notorious RINO. I’m not familiar with Fred Malek, but in the year 2013, “longtime Republican fundraiser” tells you all you need to know. And listen to Malek: It’s not that the GOP is “‘intolerant and insensitive’ to Hispanic voters,” but they’re “intolerant and insensitive” to the GOP.]
“We haven’t addressed immigration reform in an intelligent and sensitive way, and until we do we can forget about the Hispanic vote,” Malek said.
[“In an intelligent and sensitive way”? What does that mean in English? You’ve wasted a generation Hispandering, and they still hate you, yet you refuse to face reality!]
Republican pollster Whit Ayres, the author of the HLN study on the party’s weakness among Hispanics, argued that there is an opening now to win popular support for immigration measures with voters who may have been more skeptical in the past.
“A lot of Republicans and center-right people have been persuaded that what we were doing in the past was not working and we need to do something different. [That “something different” is called immigration patriotism. But you’re looking to repackage the same old, same old. You haven’t learned a thing.] What that different thing is remains to be seen,” Ayres said. “But there is real openness among people on the center-right proposals that they were not open to before the 6th of November.”
[“That different thing” will entail more and bigger lies, like claiming that an amnesty will have economic benefits for America.]
At least at this early stage, AAN’s advocacy isn’t touting specific provisions of immigration legislation or pushing for specific measures to be included or excluded from any bill. Instead, their goal is to make the argument that addressing the country’s immigration problems would be good for the economy and consistent with conservative principles – and to put a sympathetic face on arguments that more conservative voters rarely hear from their own side.
[They’re not “conservatives.” You want a solution? Here goes: Deport, deport, deport. And arrest, fine, and prosecute felonious employers by the thousands.]
Informed strategists say AAN has realistic aspirations for bringing Hispanic voters into the GOP tent: moving immigration off the agenda may be a necessary step, but the party will have to wage a longer campaign to win over Hispanics even after immigration has been dealt with.
[“Informed strategists”? Like who? This is just Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman blowing yet more smoke up our butts.]
Whatever the time frame, Republicans say they are determined to tackle their party’s desperate underperformance with minorities, and do what it takes to avoid losing Hispanic voters by 44 points – as Romney did last year – in the future.
“We’ve got to be doing something about it, and that’s going to take a long, determined effort,” Walsh said. “We’ve got to start a conversation.”
[How about “starting a conversation” about how to hold onto your white base? Oh, apparently, whites’ votes don’t count.]
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