President Obama told a group of Hispanic journalists today that he won’t need to go negative to win over Latino voters in the 2012 presidential campaign. Instead, he may just let some of the crazy rhetoric coming from the Republican debates speak for itself.
“I don’t think it requires us to go negative in the sense of us running a bunch of ads that are false, or character assassinations,” Obama told Univision News. “It will be based on facts … We may just run clips of the Republican debates verbatim. We won’t even comment on them, we’ll just run those in a loop on Univision and Telemundo, and people can make up their own minds.”
Although Hispanic support for the President has eroded somewhat since the 2008 election, Obama clearly believes that he will still be very appealing to Latino voters when compared to his Republican opponent. With frontrunners like Mitt Romney, who has repeatedly attacked Rick Perry’s support of the Texas DREAM Act, and Herman Cain — who has suggested that we secure the border with an electrified fence — who could blame him?
Ridiculing his Republican rivals isn’t Obama’s only plan to win Latino support. Obama also told the journalists that he would make immigration reform a “prominent part” of his campaign, along with exploring smaller reform items such as the DREAM Act between now and the 2012 election.
