Behold the newest Twitter handle from the House Republican Conference:
Bienvenidos a la pá¡gina oficial de Twitter de la Conferencia Republicana de la Cámara de Representantes de los Estados Unidos.' @GOPespanol via web That tweet announced the launch of the House Republican Conference's new Spanish-language Twitter feed. It was posted at around 10:48 AM ET on Monday morning and more than five hours later, at 4:30 PM ET, it had gathered a grand total of ... 31 followers. (Full disclosure: I am one of those 30 followers. Presumably, our numbers will grow, but yikes. 31 in five hours? C'mon!)
Also as of 4:30 PM ET, not a single elected House Republican was following the feed. Moreover, the GOP Conference itself which has more than 40,000 followers, hadn't sent out a single Tweet letting the world know about their new Spanish-language communications tool, nor had any other member of House Republican leadership.
Compare the near complete silence from Republicans about their new outreach effort to their all-hands-on-deck effort from last week to promote #Obamaquester on Twitter. You couldn't fire up Twitter on Friday without seeing someone say something about that'because, unlike Latino outreach, that was something House Republicans cared about.
If you figured that the explanation for the GOP going slowly on their new outreach effort had something to do with anti-Latino elected officials like Rep. Steve King (R-IA), then you're right. National Journal reports King has led the attack on the effort from within the House GOP conference, and while the Twitter account was nonetheless allowed to go forward, Republicans decided to delay promoting it to mollify their party's nativists.
Bottom line: If a party's idea of Latino outreach involves staying silent about the fact they are reaching out to Latinos, then the party in question is the Grand Old Party.
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