March 23, 2012 07:16 PM UTC

GOP leader: America looking like dictatorial and tyrannical places that immigrants come from

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• by: Jason Salzman

( – promoted by Colorado Pols)

Conservative talk-radio hosts are obviously a big part of the reason the Republican Party has a problem with women voters.

But they’re also a serious drag on the GOP’s appeal to Hispanics.

“I’m still looking for that immigrant who came to America who had a burning desire for free birth control,” said KLZ talk-radio host Jason Worley on the air Wednesday. “I haven’t found them yet. If we do find them, I will offer to put them on the air, so we can get the ditsy college girl from Illinois who can come on and go, ‘Yah, what I’d like for freedom and liberty is, ahh, free birth control, Yeah me!'”

This elicited laughter not only from co-host Ken Clark but also from Pauline Olvera, a vice chair of the Denver Republican Party.

Olvera is also on the Board of Directors for Colorado Hispanic Republicans, a new group trying to recruit Colorado Hispanics to join the GOP.

Asked by Worley “what message is catching on in those Hispanic communities,” Olvera answered:

“Well, we don’t really talk about [Republican] party issues,” she said.

One wonders why. Do Hispanics maybe dislike Republican issues? Worley didn’t ask, and Olvera flew up to a cruising altitude of 5,000 feet and waxed broad and meaningless.

“We talk about our values,” she told Worley. Our values are faith, family, freedom, individual freedom. And those are very strong values in our Hispanic community. And those values are exactly what the Republican stands for. So when we talk about those things, it clicks, right away. A lot of small business owners are in our community. They want a really good education for their children. They want choices in the education of their children.”

So why is Olvera’s organization opposing legislation that would give the top-achieving children of undocumented parents a break on college tuition in Colorado? How does that comport with giving Hispanic children choice and freedom?

Worley didn’t ask, but you get the feeling he understood the problem his party faces with Hispanics, when it comes to real-life issues, because he did ask Olvera, “What kind of resistance, if any, do you find to the quote-unquote Republican Party?”

“Well, she answered, you know there is always going to be, for the time being, that little bit of a negative connotation to the Republican name, unfortunately.”

Full stop. You’d think Worley would have wanted to delve into this a bit. Is it because Hispanics understand that freedom is meaningless without opportunity? Opportunities provided by stuff like the college tuition bill, Obamacare, and government protections that create the kind of level playing field that give immigrants a chance?

Worley didn’t ask, so Olvera continued:

We go out there and we just start talking to people. And asking them questions about their values. And doing surveys and stuff. And we’re going to be going to Cinco de Mayo in May. And we’re going to have our booth up there. And we’ll have our nice big banner. We’re going to be bringing people along and inviting them to our meet-and-greets.

Great. The organization plans to fly a big banner a couple months from now. Nothing fired in Worley’s mind to make him as the question, “Where’s the substance?”

So on went Olvera:

“The reason we all came to this country is because of individual freedom. We left tyranny and dictatorship.  I think people are starting to wake up and see America kind of going toward the type of government immigrants are leaving and starting to resonate with our message.”

Olvera’s statement is so out there, along the lines of a GOP state Senator comparing Obama to Hitler last week, that I doubt it’s ever been put to Hispanics in any of the gazillion polls Olvera is obviously thinking of when she talks about the “values” Hispanics embrace.

Again, one wonders about the specifics here, but Worley didn’t ask for any.

Which was probably good for Olvera’s cause, because if Worley and Olvera tried to explain with a few details why America is heading toward dictatorship, probably citing stuff like Obamacare, Medicare, worker protections, etc., basically government acting on behalf of people, they’d be offering up a list of reasons Hispanics are known to dislike the GOP. Of course, I could be wrong, but with shallow interviews like this one, we’ll never know.