ArcaMax

SAN DIEGO -- For Latino voters, the 2012 election will likely come down to a choice between two things they hold dear: loyalty and respect.

If they want to be loyal to a brand name that they have supported for the last 50 years, Latinos will vote Democratic to re-elect Barack Obama. Just like Latino grandmothers who buy the same laundry detergent for decades, they'll do it without even thinking about it.

That's just as well because if Latinos really thought about it, they'd see the catch: If they want to be respected, there's no way they can vote for Obama.

The president has shown that he has zero respect for Latinos. His insults come in three phases.

In Phase 1, Obama cynically uses the removal of undocumented Latino immigrants to win over groups of voters he cares more about: white suburbanites, union members, African-Americans, working-class Americans who compete for jobs with illegal immigrants, etc.

In Phase 2, he disregards the immeasurable pain being afflicted upon immigrant families by his deportation policies, which have left thousands of children without mothers or fathers.

Some of those people might have been due special consideration. Many of the children left behind are U.S. citizens, a factor that -- under past administrations -- might have helped keep their parents out of the clutches of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Now, with monthly quotas to fill and the deportation machine on overdrive, those days are over. According to newly released data obtained by the Applied Research Center through the Freedom of Information Act, in the first half of this year, the Obama administration -- as part of nearly 397,000 deportations in fiscal 2011 -- carried out more than 46,000 deportations of parents with a U.S-born child. Between 1998 and 2007 -- that is, during the second half of the Clinton administration and most of the George W. Bush administration -- only about 8 percent of deportees had U.S.-citizen children. Also, it took two presidents nine years to rack up, between them, 2.2 million deportations. Obama has removed nearly 1.2 million in less than three years.

The administration lies about whether DREAM Act students are being deported, about Republicans being the only obstacle to immigration reform, about whether the president has the executive power to stop deportations, about whether the administration is really conducting serious evaluations of pending deportation cases, about whether ICE is using prosecutorial discretion to limit removal proceedings to bad actors, and, more recently, about whether most of the people deported since Obama took office were serious "criminals" as opposed to people who simply ran stoplights, or had old felonies for which they served time, or re-entered the country once deported.

The fog from this administration is so thick I find that -- consistent with the adage that ignorance is bliss -- the Latino backers of Obama who are the most blissful are also the most ignorant of his record. Many turn a blind eye by telling themselves that electing a Republican would be worse.

Which brings us to Phase 3, where, in the biggest insult of all, Obama has the gall to drive this point home -- just in case any Latino voters out there might have missed it, rubbing their noses in the fact that they have few viable choices in 2012. Obama recently told a group of Latino journalists that his re-election campaign could win Latino votes just by running ads showing the GOP debates.

According to Univision, the Spanish-language network, the campaigner in chief told the journalists: "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. 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."

Can you believe the arrogance of this guy? He sends out these messages with Spanish-language media because he thinks most Americans won't hear it.

Then, putting salsa on the taco, Obama added: "That's not to say the Latino community is going to think my administration is perfect. But I think they know where my heart is."

What heart?

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Ruben Navarrette's e-mail address is ruben(at symbol)rubennavarrette.com

Copyright 2011 Washington Post Writers Group