Marco Solo

Looks like Florida Senator Marco Rubio isn't the GOP's great Latino hope, according to Ruben Navarrette of the Washington Post.

Poor Marco Rubio. Florida’s junior senator could have been a contender. Instead, he’s become a caricature.

In parts of the Hispanic community, Rubio is thought of as just another ambitious politician who is willing to sell out Latinos to curry favor with Anglo colleagues. That’s what you hear from Internet chatter, letters to the editor, Latino listservs and comments on Spanish-language media.

Just seven months after taking office, the Republicans’ great Latino hope has squandered the one thing that made him unique, interesting and valuable to his party: the potential that he could help mend fences with disaffected Latino voters alienated by the GOP’s simplistic and mean-spirited approach to the immigration issue.

In a recent poll by Latino Decisions and ImpreMedia, immigration was the No. 1 issue for Latino voters, topping jobs and the economy by more than 15 points. More than half of the respondents said they know someone who is undocumented. This issue hits close to home.

Over the past few years, Republicans have dug themselves into a hole with Latino voters, and Rubio was supposed to help pull them out. It’s one reason that Beltway pundits continue to speculate whether he could wind up as the GOP’s vice presidential nominee in 2012 and whether this alone would be enough to persuade Latinos to give Republicans a fair hearing.

This is what Rubio was supposed to bring to the party. Otherwise, what good is he to his colleagues if he can only deliver votes — for instance, from Tea Partyers — that would probably go to Republicans anyway?

Former Florida Republican Party chairman Al Cardenas believes that Rubio could do the GOP a lot of good in 2012. Now head of the American Conservative Union, Cardenas recently told Politico that putting Rubio on the presidential ticket would “almost guarantee” a Republican victory.

Cardenas needs to get out more — out of Florida and, better yet, out to the Southwest.

Rubio is becoming persona non grata among Latinos outside of the Cuban American community, which represents only 3 percent of the Latino population in the United States. Specifically, he is becoming intensely disliked by many naturalized Mexicans and Mexican Americans, who make up as much as 67 percent of the U.S. Latino population. Those voters could affect the electoral outcome in battleground states such as Colorado and New Mexico, and in vote-rich states such as Texas and California.

All this has happened because, since arriving in Washington, Rubio has followed his party’s pitiful example of dealing with the immigration issue in a clumsy, reactionary and unimaginative way.