`Getting' Latinos

ACROSS THE NATION, Republicans are asking what they did wrong in the 2006 midterms. This is a question with many answers. But few missteps were more foolish -- and few will be harder to correct -- than those made with Latino voters. The appointment this week of Cuban-born Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida to chair the Republican National Committee is a good way to make a new start. But the damage done in the last year goes deeper than symbolism, and it will take more than one appointment to undo it.

Republicans have, of course, long been divided about Latinos -- split between those who "get it" and those who don't. President Bush was the most prominent Republican who got it, though he was hardly alone. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudy Giuliani, George Pataki and others have long understood the GOP's inherent appeal for the fastest-growing voting bloc in the country. In a national poll last month, 34% of Latinos called themselves conservative, 29% moderate and only 24% liberal.

Diverse as they can be in origin and outlook, on many issues -- abortion, homosexuality, education, homeownership, small-business concerns and Iraq -- Latinos tend to line up with Republicans. And though Democrats have been wooing these voters longer and have won the lifetime loyalties of many in the second and third generations, immigrants have been up for grabs -- and for more than 10 years now Republicans have been making a hard run at them.

That effort was working pretty well. Between 1996 and 2004, Bush and Karl Rove managed to double the percentage of Latinos voting Republican in presidential elections: up from 21% for Bob Dole to a whopping 44% for Bush two years ago. Other Republicans across the country were making similar inroads. In 2004, Bush advisor Matthew Dowd said that in the years ahead, the GOP would have to keep its share above 40% if it wanted to remain the majority party.

But that scenario failed to account for the Republicans who didn't get it -- and in the last year or so these naysayers have destroyed everything Bush built. Republican hard-liners in the House refused to enact the president's immigration reform. They passed a bill making felons of illegal immigrants, not because it was good law but merely to make a political point. They spent recent months demagoguing the immigration issue, first at a series of "field hearings" in their districts and then on the campaign trail, casting newcomers as terrorists and criminals and anyone who seemed to side with them as un-American.