Report: Furious McCain Lashed Out at Hispanic Leaders During GOP "Outreach Meeting"

Posted by Joshua Holland, AlterNet at 2:40 PM on April 4, 2009.

The Republicans have a major problem with Latino voters, which is a structural problem for the party given that they represent the fastest-growing group of voters in the country, and many are distributed in hotly contested swing states (see this report (PDF) if you have a hankerin' for some hard data).

Republican leaders are rightly concerned -- theirs is a party with a rapidly shrinking base made up largely of white, married people who identify themselves as Christians (almost 80 percent of the electorate in the 1950s, that demographic made up a little more than  40 percent of voters in the 2000s, according to political scientist Alan Abramowitz).

For several years now, party leaders have talked quite a bit about reaching out to Latinos (as well as African Americans), but with little success. They're caught between a demographic rock and the hard place represented by not only the party's stunning failures while in power, but also by the right-wing bloggers and radio squawkers whose over-the-top rhetoric on immigration continues to send Hispanics -- many of whom might be tempted to vote Republican based on social issues like abortion -- fleeing to the Dems in droves.

Last month, according to a report in the National Journal (via ThinkProgress), key GOP members, McCain among them, sat down with a group of  Hispanic activists in an attempt to bridge their differences. It didn't go well, with McCain showing his legendary temper and, according to several sources who attended the meeting, going into "you people" mode ...

John McCain sounds angry and frustrated that, despite the risks he took in pushing immigration reform, Hispanic voters flocked to Democrat Barack Obama in last year's presidential contest. McCain's raw emotions burst forth recently as he heatedly told Hispanic business leaders that they should now look to Obama, not him, to take the lead on immigration.

What began as a collegial airing of views abruptly changed when McCain spoke about immigration, according to these sources, who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution ...

"He was angry," one source said. "He was over the top. In some cases, he rolled his eyes a lot. There were portions of the meeting where he was just staring at the ceiling, and he wasn't even listening to us. We came out of the meeting really upset."

McCain's message was obvious, the source continued: After bucking his party on immigration, he had no sympathy for Hispanics who are dissatisfied with President Obama's pace on the issue. "He threw out [the words] 'You people -- you people made your choice. You made your choice during the election,' " the source said. "It was almost as if [he was saying] 'You're cut off!' We felt very uncomfortable when we walked away from the meeting because of that."

[...]

Having stuck his neck out in the past, McCain apparently is in no mood to do so again for an ethnic group he seems to view as ungrateful. On NBC's Meet the Press on March 29, McCain repeated his message that the ball is in the Democratic president's court. So far, the senator said, he has not seen much on immigration from the Obama White House, although the president recently met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and set the goal of launching the debate in the fall, a senior administration official said.

McCain's press flack -- and the other GOP leaders who attended the meeting -- denied that the talk had been as contentious as characterized. They told the Journal that it was just more of McCain's "straight talk," and that when he repeatedly said "you people" he was referring to voters who had gone for Obama in general, not Hispanics.

But, as the Journal notes ...

But one person's straight talk is another person's vitriol. "My hands were shaking," one source said. "I was nervous as no-end." The senator's comments went on for several minutes at least. And by the end of the meeting, another participant, who had supported McCain in last year's presidential election, was so shaken by the display of temper that he decided it is good that McCain isn't in the White House.

McCain's anger is obviously misplaced. Although the senator has been a leader on sensible immigration reform -- and is respected by many advocates of that approach -- as a candidate for president, he was simply unable to shed the baggage of a party that has ceded the immigration issue to the anti-immigrant hardliners among its base. He should have blamed Rush Limbaugh, the guys at Fox News and other public faces of the Republican Party whose rhetoric had as much to do with McCain's lack of support among Latinos as the tanking economy or the occupation of Iraq.

But much more important than that is the potential impact of McCain ceding the issue to Obama and the Dems. If true, it would make passage of pragmatic, commonsense immigration reform much more difficult. As Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democrat Network, told me last month, "It's going to be hard without McCain, because no Republicans want to be seen running to his left on immigration."

My sense, though, is that this is about McCain's ego being bruised after losing his one shot at the Oval Office, largely on the backs of Latino voters, and that his support will be there as long as the bill that eventually comes to the floor looks substantially similar to the "Grand Bargain" he cooked up with Ted Kennedy in 2006.

Tagged as: immigration, mccain

Joshua Holland is an editor and senior writer at AlterNet.