Sr. Romney sporting his new day-laborer tan. |
His appearance was ironic, since he famously campaigned against bilingual education when running for governor of Massachusetts and during the GOP presidential primary, but that's beside the point.
Continuing a Romney campaign standard, most of Mitt's responses ignored specifics, instead opting to smooth out the harsh rhetoric seen during the circus that was the primary (Mexicano asado, anyone?).
While Romney continued his hard stance against the DREAM Act, he offered a conciliatory plan to let DREAM-eligible youth who serve in the military earn permanent status. Mitt attacked Obama's executive order granting undocumented youth legal status, calling it a “stop-gap measure,” but offered no other plan of his own.
Romney did indicate that he'd be in favor of Senator Marco Rubio's now-dead GOP version of the DREAM Act, which offers undocumented immigrants a chance at permanent status, but not citizenship -- we call it the Ream Act.
Speaking of immigration, the Univision forum hosts later pressed Mitt on his infamous "self-deportation" policy, with a clearly-flustered Mitt replying that he's not "going to round up people around the country and deport them." "I believe people make their own choices as to whether they want to go home and that’s what I mean by self-deportation," he continued. "People decide if they want to go back to the country of their origin.”
Quite a stretch from his endorsement of Arizona's "Papers please" law at a GOP debate earlier this year.
Still, unlike Mitt, most Latino youth don't have the opportunity to self-deport to Paris when the going gets tough.
Most telling about Romney's appearance was his utterance of the pejorative "illegal aliens" when speaking about DREAM-eligible youth during the forum, perhaps forgetting that he was speaking to a room full of Latino Obama-voting victims who pay no taxes and don't care for their lives, and not the angry white bread voters of CPAC.
The Univision forum is unlikely to help Romney's polling, with Fox News' own Latino division finding that that only 14 percent of the group would vote for him, compared to a whopping 70 percent for President Barack Obama. Of course, that's still better than the 0% of African-Americans who say they're voting for Romney.
Perhaps those lackluster numbers explain the generous use of face bronzer by Romney at the event. (No one had the heart to inform Sr. Mitt that Latinos aren't orange.)
Even his tan isn't sincere.