Just a few days ago, the Republican Party was struggling to disassociate themselves from the Party of No label, and now, with the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court of the United State, the new battle cry is, "We are not racists":
Lionel Sosa, a Texas-based Republican ad maker who designed Latino outreach for GOP presidents from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush, said that opposing Sotomayor "would be one more nail in the Republicans' image coffin in terms of Latino voters."
"When you're anti the first Latina on the Supreme Court, you're anti-my-family. . . . I would take it that these people are anti-Latino," Sosa added. "The worst thing the Republicans can do is oppose her."
The Senate's Republican leadership, aware of the potential pitfalls, began conferring Tuesday with several Latino strategists, seeking their assessment of conservative opposition.
The GOP's dilemma on Sotomayor is the latest example of the party's internal struggle over how to reinvent itself at a time that its voter base is increasingly dominated by Southern, conservative white men.
Which leads us to a classic case of, rock, meet hard place, because the very people given the "leaders of the party" label -- the Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich wing of the party -- aren't struggling at all. They've come out against Sotomayor in full attack mode, calling her, among other things, a "reverse racist," a "radical," and a "disaster." And it probably doesn't help when the media outreach person for the Republican National Committee is retweeting claims of racism against Sotomayor.
Nono is very happy.