Thanks to Stephen Fong, chairman of the Asian American caucus, Republicans have finally been given a foolproof way to better reach minorities: embrace spicy food.
“You have to like spicy food because you’re going to be eating a lot of it,” Fong said in the Conservative Inclusion panel, “Promoting the Freedom Message to all Americans” Thursday afternoon at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
According to Fong, the biggest question that conservatives are facing is how to get minorities to vote for Republicans. He said that the Republican Party needs to begin to “include” minorities as opposed to “outreach” towards the minority communities.
Fong compared current conservative outreaching practices to a fisherman who throws a lure into a pond just expecting for the fish to all bite on their own without doing any work to “embrace” the fish or communities.
Panelist Corey Stewart took it a step further than simply breaking bread with minorities; the chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors in Virginia said that he attended over 50 different minority churches in 2011.
According to Stewart, Republicans can show that they care about minorities by showing up in the “off-season.”
Stewart predicted that the current plan for conservatives to increase voter turnout would eventually lead to the extinction of the Republican Party.
“You have to show up,” Stewart said. “Too many times we Republicans spend too much time in the white, mostly Republican parts of our districts trying to increase the voter turnouts.”
Stewart, who was one of two conservatives who won elections in Virginia in 2007, is running for lieutenant governor of the commonwealth.
However, even though Republicans should embrace spicy foods and religious practices, speakers at the panel conclusively disagreed with the term “outreach.”
“When you pick up the phone and want to speak to your mother, do you say you’re outreaching your mother?” Stewart asked.
