Well, we caught a glimpse last week of how Romney's embrace of "tea party" extremism is hurting the entire Republican brand. Now, CNN is catching a glimpse of how this is finally coming around to bite Romney.
Marlene Monteolivo was a Democrat for many years, then a Republican. Now she's registered as a nonpartisan voter in Nevada who wants to support a candidate who will make the economy better.
The Colombia native, who works for a Las Vegas social services agency, says she's leaning toward GOP challenger Mitt Romney. She likes his business sensibilities.
But there's a hiccup. And it's a big one called immigration. [...]
Monteolivo doesn't like that Republicans blocked passage of the Dream Act, which would have created a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. She bristled at Romney's comment that 47% of Americans feel entitled to government aid. She took it to mean that Latinos, many of whom are not well off, are considered freeloaders.
Come November, Monteolivo says, her option might be to "vote for none of the above."
Yep, it's really coming to this. Even CONSERVATIVE Latinos who would otherwise vote Republicano are pausing and second guessing because Romney doesn't respect them enough to give any real answers on immigration policy... Or really anything else, for that matter.
This is something that Steve Kornacki mentioned earlier today.
The Republican Party has moved far to the right in the Obama-era, and its primary voters have demanded a new level of ideological zeal from GOP candidates. Related to this, the GOP base has also demanded absolute, unwavering opposition to just about every major policy Obama has proposed and action he has taken. On immigration, this has put Romney in a particularly awful spot. To run on the ideas he embraced during the primaries would seriously harm Romney with swing voters. But to move away from those views risks inciting a backlash among the Republican voters Romney is relying on to turn out in droves this fall.
He had a narrow opening, it seemed, but once Obama seized it, Romney had nowhere to go on immigration, and pretty much nothing to say. His belated admission now that he wouldn’t repeal the executive order hardly feels like a bold stroke of leadership. It’s a faint echo.
And so it continues. For some time now, Mitt Romney and his G-O-TEA acolytes have had no answer on immigration policy. That's because they now don't want to admit to pandering to their xenophobic "TEA" fueled base earlier this year. And because they still lack the cojones to buck the teabaggers and agree to a reasonable and comprehensive solution, Congress is still at a stalemate on this. And because Latino voters are not as stupid as Romney operatives were hoping they'd be, their candidate is in a hell of a lot of trouble... And he very well may take down the entire party with him this fall.
And in the end, los Republicanos only have themselves to blame for their pendejo of a "grandstand".
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