Hispanic Voters Must Be the “Professional Left” Too

From FireDogLake:

When White House press secretary Robert Gibbs excoriated government critics (“the professional left”) for being ungrateful SOB’s considering all that this administration has done for them, he wasn’t acting as a lone wolf. It’s a refrain that has oft been uttered by this White House, from Rahm Emanuel’s “f*#@ing r&#tards” to “top Obama advisors” who vent to Politico about an “elite group of commentators on the left.”

Roger Simon defends Gibbs this morning, and I have no doubt he’s right when he says he believes “the president agrees with Gibbs and was neither angered nor disappointed by Gibbs’s statements, which came not in the heat of his daily briefing but in the cool of his West Wing office.“

But with the public’s approval ratings of Congress at near-historic lows and not budging, it’s hard to see how this could be the fault of a couple of bloggers nobody has heard of. More likely, it’s the result of constituencies who aren’t happy with symbolic gestures while the government’s priority is to battle for the dollars of big corporate donors.

According to Gallup, Obama’s approval ratings among Hispanics has dropped 20 points this year. They note that “the two major drops in Hispanics’ approval of Obama this year — in February and May — coincide with two periods when the president was under fire for not doing enough to promote comprehensive immigration reform in Congress.”