hispanic – Moe Lane

There will be no peace in Congress while this man is Senate Majority Leader.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Tuesday asserted the southern border is secure despite the massive surge of illegal minors from Central America that has overwhelmed federal agencies.

…Yeah, let me interrupt real fast: the above sentence is how The Hill expects its writers to handle utter nonsense like Harry Reid’s. Sure, the temptation to instead gibber and meep at the sanity-ripping talking points may be nigh-insurmountable, but The Hill expects the people who write for it to surmount the challenge anyway. It’s a professionalism thing. Besides, this isn’t even the most idiotic thing said to a political reporter.

“The border is secure,” he told reporters after the Senate Democrats’ weekly policy lunch. “[Sen.] Martin Heinrich [(D-N.M.)] talked to the caucus today. He’s a border state senator. He said he can say without any equivocation the border is secure.”

…I bet that Martin Heinrich is now regretting taking the last piece of banana cream pie from the Senate cafeteria even though everybody knows that Harry Reid loves banana cream pie and that he looks forward to having a piece of it every Thursday. Because some people have no consideration and Heinrich is apparently one of them. Continue reading Harry Reid pretends to think that the border is secure.

…unexpectedly.

Gallup mentions the most obvious point – the President has slipped from his historical approval rating among African-Americans (usually around 92%) all the way down to 85%* – but it kind of obscures a detail on the graph with regard to Hispanic voters. They acknowledge that the President is currently at a low with 54% of those voters, but Gallup does not point out that Obama’s approval rating dropped by double digits with those voters over a year ago and hasn’t really come back since. For that matter, the real story from that graph is that the President has a 39% approval rating among whites; his approval rating among those voters at the beginning of his term was somewhere just above 60%.

Andrew Malcolm is right to couch all of this in terms of it merely being worrisome for the President; after all, it’s early days yet. But he’s also right that Obama should be worrying about this, given that hyper-enthusiasm is precisely what his campaign needs if they seriously plan to raise a billion dollars for the 2012 campaign. In fact, i think that the billion-dollar number is going to end up being a bit of an albatross for the President: it will require a constant, probably grueling, emphasis on fundraising in order to work, and it has already forced the President to formally re-enter the electoral arena months early. In other words, the President may have been better off if he had decided not to try to beat his high score. Continue reading Gallup: Obama slips with African-Americans, Hispanics…