Gingrich-Rubio 2012?

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


Gearing up for his likely 2012 presidential bid, Newt Gingrich has given himself a pro-Latino makeover. Having once criticized Latinos for continuing to speak “the language of living in the ghetto,” he’s now become a dutiful Spanish language student. And last week he held a two-day conference for Latino conservatives. In his keynote address, Gingrich tried to come across as a Bush-style moderate on immigration: “We are not going to deport 11 million people…There has to be some zone between deportation and amnesty.” He emphasized he’s open to a pathway for legalizing undocumented immigrants: “People who have been here obeying every law except immigration…you’re not going to send them home.”

Gingrich’s Latino outreach comes just as another round of the immigration fight is about to break out on Capitol Hill. On Wednesday, the Senate is scheduled to vote on the DREAM Act, which would provide a pathway to legalization for young immigrants who’ve completed two years of college or military service. While the bill could conceivably pass the lower chamber, it doesn’t take a pessimist to predict that it will hit a total impasse in the Senate.

At least five or more Senate Republicans need to sign on for the immigrant legalization bill to pass, and the GOP has made it abundantly clear lately that it ain’t gonna happen. The debate isn’t likely to ennoble the Democrats in the eyes of Latino voters, many of whom have been disappointed that the party hasn’t pushed harder to make immigration a priority. But it’s even less likely to attract them to the GOP, whose harsh and occasionally ugly rhetoric against immigrants is likely to make a reappearance during the debate next week.

At Gingrich’s summit in Washington, conservatives Latinos (and pro-Latino conservatives) tried to push the message that Latino voters were fundamentally in sync with the GOP principles of free enterprise, self-reliance, and social conservatism. But, when pressed, some admitted that they needed to push back against the anti-immigrant, anti-Latino rhetoric within the GOP. Andro Nodarse-Leon—a Miami investment banker and board member of a Jeb Bush-led PAC—described the GOP’s race problem:

There is a massive amount of ignorance in part of the party, and that’s the reality. When you have ignorance, you basically default to stereotypes…You need to educate that part of the party, if you will, about the contributions that Hispanics have made to this country, continue to make to this country.

Nodarse-Leon, for one, has pinned his hopes on Marco Rubio to help counter such ignorance. Having worked on the Florida Senator-elect’s campaign from the start, he’s confident that Rubio will push for moderate immigration reforms like guest-worker visas and changes to the legal immigration system—effectively reclaiming the Bush immigration agenda. And Gingrich has come closer than any other 2012 Republican contender willing to venture back to the land of the reasonable on the issue.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate