New York Times
By Alan Rappeport
July 8, 2015
Senator
Lindsey Graham said on Wednesday that Republicans have been doing
themselves no favors when it comes to courting the crucial Hispanic vote
and warned that Donald
J. Trump should not be the party’s spokesman on the issue.
“My
party is in a hole with Hispanics — the first rule of politics when
you’re in a hole is stop digging,” Mr. Graham said after a foreign
policy speech in Washington.
“And somebody needs to take the shovel out of Donald Trump’s hand.”
Mr.
Graham, the presidential candidate from South Carolina, disputed Mr.
Trump’s assertion that Mexican immigrants who cross into the United
States are rapists and criminals,
adding that he did not need a lecture from the billionaire businessman
on border security.
“Most
of them are good hard-working people cleaning our toilets, picking the
crops that we all enjoy, changing the beds and working three or four
jobs in the shadows to
try to keep their family afloat,” Mr. Graham said.
The
senator said that his own party had clearly made mistakes on the
immigration issue over the years, as evidenced by the steep fall in
support among Hispanic voters
recently. However, he pushed back against comments from Hillary Rodham
Clinton, who said on Tuesday that Republicans operate on a spectrum of
hostility toward immigrants.
“I
want to remind anybody who cares about immigration reform, that
Obamacare, Dodd-Frank and the stimulus went ahead of you,” Mr. Graham
said, recalling that President
Obama and Democrats had majorities in Congress when he took office. “He
didn’t do a damn thing and Hillary Clinton never lifted a finger.”
While Mr. Graham touched on domestic policy, the bulk of his remarks were dedicated to foreign affairs.
He
expressed skepticism about the prospect of a nuclear deal with Iran,
saying that a bad agreement could lead to chaos in the Middle East. And
he compared the rise of
the Islamic State with Nazi Germany, calling for the deployment of
10,000 American troops to Syria to quell the growth of the militant
group.
At
one point a member of the liberal activist group Code Pink confronted
Mr. Graham on his worldview, accusing him of being a warmonger and
saying that Republicans were
responsible the growing threat of terrorism around the world.
Mr.
Graham closed his eyes and wiped his eyebrow until she relinquished the
microphone. After joking that she was apparently undecided on his
candidacy, he turned serious
and said: “I think people like you make the world incredibly dangerous.
I think people like you are radical Islam’s best hope.”
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