By Pat Buchanan

Published: Tuesday, November 20, 2012, 8:56 p.m.
Updated: Tuesday, February 19, 2013

"What the president's campaign did was focus on certain members of his base coalition, give them extraordinary financial gifts from the government and then work very aggressively to turn them out to vote, and that strategy worked."

Thus did political analyst Mitt Romney identify the cause of his defeat in a call to disconsolate contributors.

Republicans piled on. "Completely unhelpful," Gov. Bobby Jindal told Wolf Blitzer. We don't advance the "debate by insulting folks."

"A terrible thing to say," Chris Christie told Joe Scarborough. "You can't expect to be the leader of all the people and be divisive."

Oh. Was not Abe Lincoln at least mildly "divisive"? Did not FDR insult Wall Street folks by calling them "money changers in the temple of our civilization"? Was Ronald Reagan a uniter when he said, "Let the bloodbath begin!" and mocked "welfare queens"? And Harry Truman, did he not insult and divide - and win?

Consider America's largest, fastest-growing minority. Hispanics constituted 10 percent of the electorate, up from 7.5 in 2008. But Mitt got only 27 percent of that, the lowest of any Republican presidential candidate.

What does the real Hispanic community look like today? Let us consider only native-born Hispanics, U.S. citizens.

According to Steve Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, which analyzed Census Bureau statistics from 2012:

• More than one in five Hispanic citizens lives in poverty.

• One in four Hispanic-American men 25 to 55 is out of work.

• More than half of all Hispanic women 25 to 55 are unmarried.

• Half of all Hispanic households with children are headed by an unmarried woman, and 55 percent depend on welfare programs.

These numbers do not improve with time, as they did with the Irish, Italian, Polish, Jewish and German immigrants who poured into the United States between 1890 and 1920. Third-generation Hispanics do worse than second-generation Hispanics in all the above categories.

This is a huge community being sucked into the morass of a mammoth welfare state. Consider a typical Hispanic household with children.

It is headed by an unmarried woman who receives food stamps and public housing or rent supplements to feed and house her children.

Her kids are educated free from Head Start to K-12 and fed by school breakfast and lunch programs. Should they graduate high school, Pell Grants and student loans are there for college.

For cash, mom gets welfare checks. If she takes a job, she will receive an earned income tax credit to supplement her income. If she loses her job, she can get 99 weeks of unemployment checks.

For health care, there is Medicaid and ObamaCare. And like 45 percent of all Hispanic households, she has no federal income tax liability.

Why should this woman vote for a party that will cut taxes she does not pay, but reduce benefits she does receive?

These are big-government people.

There are 50 million Hispanics in America today. California is lost to the GOP. Nevada and Colorado are slipping away. Arizona and Texas are next up on the block.

With the U.S. Hispanic population in 2050 projected to reach 130 million, the acolytes of Karl Rove have their work cut out for them.

Pat Buchanan is the author of "Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?"

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