“Language of the ghetto” comment comes back to bite Gingrich
By JORDAN FABIAN
Channel: Politics
Newt Gingrich is infuriated that a controversial inference he made about Spanish five years ago has become one of the chief attacks against his credibility with Latino voters.
During a 2007 speech on education before the National Federation of Republican Women, Gingrich said that the U.S. should replace bilingual education with English immersion “so people learn the common language of the country — so that they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto.”
The former Speaker later apologized for the comment in Spanish, but the sound byte has come back to haunt him during his bid for the GOP presidential nomination. His chief Republican rival Mitt Romney and President Obama have both used it in campaign literature against him.
Romney has used the remark most effectively against Gingrich. He featured the comment in a minute-long Spanish radio spot that’s aired throughout Florida, where over 11 percent of registered Republicans are Latino.
“[Ronald] Reagan definitely would have never offended us, Hispanics, as Gingrich did by saying that Spanish is the language of the ghetto,” says the voiceover.
Romney has outspent Gingrich four to one on advertising in Florida, a state with large media markets that make television and radio ads more important than any other early primary state. The Gingrich campaign claims that margin is even higher when it comes to Spanish-language advertising.
Gingrich trails Romney by 26-points among Latino Republican likely voters in Florida, according to a Univision News/ABC News/Latino Decisions survey released last week and the former Speaker’s allies blame that on Romney’s ad blitz, especially in Spanish.
“Romney’s money and false attacks are making the difference. Newt’s record in the Latino community is a thousand times better than Mitt’s non-record,” said longtime GOP operative Lionel Sosa, who is Gingrich’s Spanish-language ad man. “Newt is being outspent in Spanish media 50 to 1. That is the difference.”
The former Massachusetts governor actually stumbled when addressing the attack during a debate last Thursday, saying that he doubted the remark was used in his advertising. But the effect has been clear.
“When Gingrich was in office, he spoke badly of Hispanics,” one Latino voter told Univision News outside Cafe Versailles in Little Havana.
Gingrich has been angered over the reemergence of the comment. For starters he was supposed to be able to outflank Romney with Latino voters because of his more moderate stance on immigration.
But it turns out that his immigration message has not paid off with Florida Latinos, who are largely Cuban and Puerto Rican and place a lesser emphasis on immigration issues than other Latinos. The Obama campaign piled on Monday, arguing in a strategy memo that the comment “neutralizes any credit [Gingrich] may have received” for his immigration plan.
But Gingrich is especially steamed because he says the comment was taken out of context. He pointed out this weekend that he never specifically referred to Spanish during his speech.
“I never used the word Spanish in the conversation. I was giving a speech, talking about the importance of everybody learning English,” he said during an appearance on Fox News Sunday. “This was not a reference to any one language. We don’t want anyone trapped in America not being able to speak English because English is the language of commercial success.
“[Romney] turned that on its head and basically suggested something that was simply plain not true.”
Pressed by host Chris Wallace why he apologized for the remark in Spanish, Gingrich said he “did so deliberately because it had been taken out of context.”
“Here is the irony and here is why Romney’s behavior is so outrageous. As governor, guess what he was in favor of? Immersion in English. He has said this on the debate stage,” Gingrich added. “It’s a way for him to try to divide people in a fundamentally false way.”
