Cruz and Martinez not the "crossover hits" Republicans wishfully believe

At the recent Republican Leadership Conference held in New Orleans, Texas Sen. Ted Cruz “won” a presidential straw poll of questionable value, since his audience consisted of right-wing extremists and Tea Party types, and more moderate (if such a thing exists) Republican presidential hopefuls didn’t bother to attend the event. Cruz doesn’t have a prayer of winning the Republican nomination in 2016—let alone the election—but he talks a good partisan game that excites the fanatical fringe of right, and the poll meant little other than the fact that the attendees  rewarded him for being  a “minority” who made them feel good about being bigots.

Cruz, like Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, may have a “Hispanic” name, but their heritage is right-wing Caucasian Cuban. They come from a culture that was and still is racially polarized, and pines for the day when Cuba can become what it once was: An oppressive right-wing dictatorship of the Euro-elites, who controlled and dominated the political, social and economic structure of the island, leaving the masses impoverished and powerless. Whatever propaganda is used against Cuba today, its current political system is more a testimony to how difficult it was to turn its society into something more equitable.

Nevertheless, politicians like Cruz and Rubio are being held-up by the Republicans and the media as “legitimate” representatives of the Latino demographic as a whole, and “magnets” to attract their vote. This certainly is not likely to be the case, and it took only one term to disabuse Latino voters of any illusions they may have had about Cruz. This certainly is also the case in regard New Mexico’s Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, who was elected largely on the support of Mexican-American voters who were purposely kept unaware of her true political and social inclinations. 

Martinez was recently profiled in Mother Jones as a potential successor of Sarah Palin, and for good reason. Her “punch line,” which she used at the 2012 Republican Convention, is “I’ll be damned,” and that is what most of us will be if she ever gets on a presidential ticket. She has been labeled a “reform-minded” politician, but one wonders what precisely that means. It is it because she is a “minority” who supports guns, opposes immigration reform, is a fanatical tax cutter, supports cutting education spending and government services that help the poor? What is so “reform-minded” about a governor whose self-proclaimed “bi-partisan” inclinations—which helped get her elected in 2010—turned out to be nothing but a pack of lies? Martinez has now has been exposed as megalomaniac with a “with me or against me” governing style; haven’t we had enough of such partisan extremism?

As a state prosecutor in the 1990s, Martinez was a fanatical zealot, sometimes for good, other times for something less savory. She thought nothing of locking up a mentally-retarded man in a solitary confinement cell for two years without trial. This outrageous disregard of humanity later cost the state $15.5 million in a civil lawsuit.  So single-minded was Martinez in her devotion to zeroing-in on “bad guys” that it was remarkably easy for her develop a Palin-like disinterest in what was going on in the outside world, and this was revealed during her big-donor-fueled (i.e. the Koch Brothers) campaign for governor in 2010, when she repeatedly had to ask her campaign staffers about basic information that should have been gleaned from simply scanning the front page of the local newspapers. 

Martinez and her white Republican crew are said to be the sort who see “enemies” in every nook and cranny, with the kind of paranoia some of us remember during the Nixon administration and more recently from the Karl Rove/Dick Cheney tag-team, and then course there was Sarah Palin. The vulgarity in reference to “enemies” is perhaps not surprising given that they have, after all, an insular, bigoted frame of reference. Martinez has actually alienated most party leaders in the state (much like Palin did as governor of Alaska—before she took an early retirement from her duties), but apparently she has enough “charisma” and “sass” to impress a majority of voters in the state; her re-election as governor—despite her many deceptions that got elected in the first place—seems all but assured. But will this be enough to propel her to national office? 

The current crop of Latinos in the Republican fold are being touted for their alleged “cross-over” appeal, but anyone who is paying attention should have realized by now that they speak to a very narrow side of the political spectrum, and once voters who are expected to “cross-over” see the truth (provided that the media exposes it, more likely to happen if Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee), these “rising stars” will see their “stars” setting into darkness in a blink of any eye.