Buchanan: Bush, those who speak Spanish, and politics.

Pat Buchanan examines Bush's strategy for the future of the GOP.

It was from their success in Texas that George Bush and Karl Rove devised their grand strategy for regaining the "lock" on the presidency that had been the legacy of Nixon and Reagan.

Nixon's "New Majority" and the "Reagan Coalition" were built on the same foundation: a united Republican Party to which was added the socially conservative Democrats who would defect to the GOP on "God, gays and guns," and other battleground issues of the culture war.

Rove and Bush correctly perceived that, due to immigration, the Nixon-Reagan coalition, composed almost entirely of white voters, was shrinking in relative terms. Where, in 1960, European-Americans were nearly 90 percent of the population and an even higher share of the voters, today, they are less than 70 percent of the population.

Today, a Republican can sweep the white vote 55 percent to 45 percent, and still lose. And as President Clinton merrily predicted a few years ago, white folks will be just another minority in 2050, as they are already in California and Texas.

In short, Republicans need minority voters to survive as America's Party. The Bush-Rove solution to the looming demographic disaster is to go all-out to court the nation's fastest growing minority, Hispanics, who now number 40 million and 13 percent of the U.S. population. But, in seeking to win the Hispanic vote, the inherent defects of the Bush-Rove strategy have become manifestly clear.