Popularity: 7% [?]

John McCain’s Immigration Dilemma

The job of Juan Hernandez is to win support for John McCain, particularly Latino votes. So it may seem odd that the campaign doesn’t want its national director of Hispanic outreach to get any press.

Repeated NEWSWEEK requests to interview Hernandez have been rebuffed or ignored.

When a reporter suggested talking to Hernandez at a convention of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, where Hernandez was slated to appear June 28, his name was suddenly removed from the list of scheduled speakers.

A NALEO spokesman, Eric Wagner, says someone from the McCain campaign called and asked to replace him, but didn’t offer an explanation. (A McCain aide, who refused to be quoted discussing internal campaign strategy, later told NEWSWEEK that the campaign had never signed off on Hernandez as a speaker.)

Here’s one possible reason: Hernandez is toxic to many conservatives. “He represents the opposite of everything conservative Republicans stand for,” says a GOP strategist who didn’t want to be quoted by name on a sensitive topic…..[MORE >>]

Read: Fear and Loathing in Prime Time — Immigration Myths and Cable News

Popularity: 19% [?]

The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities.

The 2008 race may turn on which party will win the lower-and middle-class whites in industrial and border states—the Democrats’ base from the New Deal to the 1960s, but “Reagan Democrats” in most presidential elections since then.

It is a sure bet that the GOP will try to paint Obama as “the other”—as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots (Obama is a Christian) and hangs around with America-haters.

The Obama team also notes that McCain himself has been the victim of a smear. In the South Carolina primary in 2000, GOP operatives spread the rumor that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black child.

Obama says he’s ready for the onslaught…..[more]

Popularity: 20% [?]