Regarding Zoltan Hajnal's "The GOP's Racial Challenge" (op-ed, Nov. 10): The real alienation and attacking may be coming from the left. It is the Democratic Congress and President Obama who did not find it worth their time or energy to bring any version of comprehensive immigration reform to the forefront in the last two years. I am also not comfortable equating immigration policy with purely racial motives, as I believe Mr. Hajnal infers.
I can think of few policy measures that would benefit black voters as important as real educational reform and job growth, both of which have been either ignored or completely mismanaged by Congress and the White House. The result of this failure is that educational opportunities for minority children are being sacrificed to maintain the current failing system in exchange for teacher union support. There is no example as clear as the sacrifice of the Opportunity Scholarship Program in Washington, D.C., which provided 1,700 children in poor families the money to escape failing public schools. Virtually all of these participants were minorities.
As for the current economic disaster, no one has been more impacted than hard-working minority families. For example, the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for African-Americans between the ages of 16 and 19 reached 49% in September. How can this be deemed acceptable to this key constituency?
I suggest that minority voting groups begin to ask tough questions when confronted with statements like "the GOP is ignoring and attacking you" or "the GOP is hateful." These important Americans are being taken for granted. Instead, I ask all racial minorities to truly assess which party has the best solutions for the problems that they face on a daily basis, and which party presses real solutions that will ensure that their children have the opportunity to reach their true potential. It is results that reveal which party has the minority voters' best interests at heart.
Brad Kropf
Overland Park, Kan.
More jobs, a growing and more competitive economy, less unemployment, an actuarially solvent Social Security and Medicare, a balanced budget that ends deficit spending and reduces the national debt, lower taxes, reduced spending by smaller and less intrusive government, real equal opportunity and an end to affirmative-action dependency, a public education system that actually educates our children, closing our borders to illegal immigration while resolving the status of illegals who are already here, energy independence—Mr. Hajnal is telling us that these objectives of the tea party now inside the GOP's "big tent" appeal only to whites and not to blacks and Hispanics. He suggests that the GOP's strategy has been to attack minorities. This is what he is teaching his students, our children? In what alternative universe does this man live?
Thornton Sanders
Charlottesville,Va.
A first-generation immigrant from Mexico who is a farm laborer in California may vote much differently than a third-generation immigrant from Cuba who owns several hair salons in south Florida. The Democratic Party is the party of welfare and big government, so it may procure more of the Latino vote now, but many more Latinos will eventually find themselves in the middle class and beyond. By that time they will be more likely to vote with their pocketbooks.
Josh Adams
Cincinnati
Let's see if I have this right. The GOP is racially challenged because it received 60% of the white vote in this last election. And Democrats aren't racially challenged when they received 90% of the black vote and two-thirds of the Latino vote. That sounds like the racial challenge is a little lopsided to me.
Ruth Beedle
Platte Woods, Mo.
Republicans do not campaign to whites. In fact, the Republican campaign message of limited government and economic liberty is universal. And it is directed at the only permanent majority: people.
Donald M. Kolehouse
Belmont, Mich.
The conventional wisdom on the left seems to be that if you don't support massive entitlements you are racist. The notion that all minorities must be spoon-fed through entitlements and anything less is an "attack," is a sign of a deeper belief on the left that minorities are not as capable as whites. Their resistance to allowing choice in education is a hallmark of that wrong-headed notion.
Laura Main-Collins
Los Angeles
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 