Republican Attacks on Sotomayor Will Alienate Hispanic Voters

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Blog posts such as this one from a Cato Institute fellow are so unfair, but simultaneously so helpful to the Democratic Party. It's confounding why the people making them would be so short-sighted:

In picking Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama has confirmed that identity politics matter to him more than merit.

Judge Sotomayor is not one of the leading lights of the federal judiciary and would not even have been on the shortlist if she were not Hispanic.

The first thing conservative or, this is from the Cato Institute's website, libertarian bloggers do when they question Judge Sonia Sotomayor's qualifications, is send every swing Hispanic voter solidly into the Democratic camp. It's even worse when they question her intelligence (which this blogger does by excluding Judge Sotomayor from the category of judicial leading lights.)

One of the few good things George W. Bush did for his party was to woo Hispanic voters. He simultaneously alienated moderates, fiscal conservatives and a host of other key constituencies. Now his surrogates are casting aside what little Hispanic support remains for the GOP. So be it. It's the Republicans' to ruin and they're doing a great job of that.

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