Does the GOP Really Want Latino Support? 

Kris Kobach is an affable, Harvard, Yale and Oxford educated 46-year old law professor who may single-handedly be costing Mitt Romney and the Republicans the White House.

Since 2010, Mr. Kobach has been the Kansas Secretary of State, a position not generally thought of as a launch pad for national notoriety. His prominence (or infamy) comes from the fact that this highly educated scholar/politician has become the brain of the anti-illegal immigration movement.

I’m borrowing the title of Al Franken’s fictional campaign autobiography to ask the Presidential Debate Commission why I or other Latino journalist was not asked to moderate one of the debates. With due respect to those chosen, while the job is challenging, it is not rocket science.

From my perch here on the fourth floor of Jerusalem's historic King David Hotel, I'm looking out over this ancient city holy to the three great religions that share Abraham in common. I'm looking down at the Jaffa Gate, one of seven entrances into the Old City cut through the 500 year old wall built by the Turks when this was part of the Ottoman Empire. The sand-colored stone wall surrounding this mile square heart of the Holy Land is still pocked with bullet holes from the fighting that has periodically raged in this unique, deeply spiritual but often violent place. In fact the half mile between the hotel and the old wall was No Man's Land following the Armistice after the 1948 War of Israeli Independence. Then Jordan held the Old City, and would until the Israeli conquest of 1967.

Let me begin with a quote from a conservative Republican concerning his treatment by Democrats on Capitol Hill.

"This is a circus. It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint, as a black American, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas, and it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree."

It was probably a cold political calculation. I can see the president cloistered with his crack team of political advisers, whispering about how Republican senator Marco Rubio was about to do something President Obama and the Democrats have been unable to do, pass at least a watered down version of the DREAM Act.