For years the Democrats have operated their party like a plantation, where black voters in particular are expected to be present but not ever actually given anything in return. Now they appear ready to try the same trick with pro-immigration reform Hispanics, in the service of saving Mary Landrieu’s Senate career.

As I am sure you know, President Obama had planned to implement a sweeping and possibly unconstitutional amnesty via executive order, but balked at doing so when it turned out that such a move was deeply and profoundly unpopular with the public and would be likely to cost several Democrat Senators their jobs. In response the Congressional Hispanic Caucus agreed to hold off on causing trouble for Obama until after the election, but demanded that Obama take action prior to Thanksgiving. Obama’s response was, essentially, “that’s no good, Mary Landrieu may still be in a runoff.” Per the WSJ, the Hispanic Caucus has agreed to back off their Thanksgiving demand for the sake of Landrieu’s election chances.

The thing that ought to be really offensive to Hispanics is the blatantly cynical campaign that Mary Landrieu is running on immigration issues. As noted by The LIBRE Initiative, Landrieu is running blaring ads right now declaring that she “voted against Amnesty nine times.” Note, though, that if you actually check Landrieu’s voting record, she has repeatedly voted FOR comprehensive immigration reform which includes a path to citizenship – in fact, the only way to make Landrieu’s claim true is to count each of these votes as a vote AGAINST “amnesty.”

Landrieu is also claiming in her current ad campaign that she is a repeat backer of the border fence, when in fact she said on the Senate floor last year that the border fence was “dumb”:

[youtube]http://youtu.be/lkT5fMbTYDA[/youtube]

It is insulting and degrading to ask people to wait on their policy preferences to save the career of a politician who is running on a platform of deliberately insulting their intelligence. But this is what the Democrat party has done to black voters for years, and now they are trying to play the same trick with Hispanics. It’s up to them to decide if they’ll stay on the plantation where the Democrats think they belong.