Latinos missing from Carson event

Greenville Online

By Rudolph Bell

August 24, 2015

Latinos missing from Carson event

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson began a full day of campaigning in South Carolina Monday with a 7:30 a.m. appearance at a Seneca landscape business that was billed as a “Latino Outreach Event.”

As it turned out, there appeared to be no Latinos in the audience of about 25, except for the owner of Unlimited Landscapes, Tony Francisco, and his brother, Poncho Francisco.

Asked whether that said anything about his appeal to Hispanic voters, or about the number of Hispanic voters in the Seneca area, Carson responded by recalling his June appearance before the National Association of Elected and Appointed Latino Officials in Las Vegas.

“I was the only Republican candidate who would dare go there,” he told The Greenville News. “I talked about the same kinds of issues, and they appreciated it. And many of them came up to me afterwards and said, ‘I’m voting for you.’ ”

Carson, a retired neurosurgeon who has never held public office, is one of three GOP White House hopefuls trolling for votes in the Upstate today, six months before South Carolina’s first-in-the-South Republican presidential preference primary.

He’s scheduled to join Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker this evening at U.S. Rep. Jeff Duncan’s annual Faith & Freedom BBQ at the Anderson Civic Center.

Tickets for the BBQ are $35 a person or $30 for a couple, and the event begins at 6 p.m.

Jaime Harrison, chairman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, said he wasn’t surprised that no Latinos attended the Carson outreach except the owner of the host business and his brother.

“Listen to the rhetoric that is coming out of the Republican Party as it relates to the Hispanic population and Hispanic immigrants to this country,” Harrison said during a conference call arranged by Democrats to counter the Republican candidates’ messages. “These guys are now even talking about repealing the 14th amendment to the United States Constitution.”

Harrison referred to calls by some of the Republican candidates, including Carson, to rethink the constitutional provision granting citizenship to anyone born in the United States, including the children of illegal immigrants.

“The rhetoric that you hear coming out of the Republican Party right now, it’s hateful and it is un-American, simply un-American,” Harrison said.

At Carson’s next stop, the Seneca Family Restaurant, the house was so packed that some people couldn’t squeeze in.

That didn’t bother Steve Taylor of West Union as he stood outside beside a cardboard cutout of Carson.

The 72-year-old retiree said he’ll vote for Carson because he likes his honesty and his Christian stance on issues “and I like his common sense more than anything else.”

Carson also said at the landscape business that he doesn’t change his message depending on the makeup of the audience. He decried the “purveyors of division” and mentioned a visit to the U.S. border with Mexico.

“There is no question we have to seal our borders” -- the southern, northern, Pacific and Atlantic, he said.

“Not so much because I’m afraid of somebody getting in here from Honduras or El Salvador,” Carson said. “I am afraid of Jihadists getting in here.”

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