Over the past few months, some of us who follow political news have seen the Republican Party almost exclusively focused on short-term tactics designed to try to win a daily news cycle. While this may give them some sense of satisfaction from time to time (e.g., when it seemed they were getting the better of Nancy Pelosi), the long-term consequences of a lot of the stuff they’re doing right now is going to be disastrous in the long-term.

For a great example of this short-term dynamic, consider all of today’s sturm und drang over newly nominated Judge Sotomayor.

The Republicans had a number of different ways they could go with this. They could have focused on the “liberal” angle, or beat the “activist judge” drums, or even dredged up all sorts of abortion oogedy-boogedy. Instead of going exclusively to these deep and proven wells, what is dominating the news? This:

One of the clear effects of the Sotomayor nomination is that we’re going to be talking — a lot — about affirmative action, for the first time in awhile. Of course, there is the rehearsed sense of outrage, from conservatives, that this Hispanic woman was nominated at all. So many qualified white men were available for the job! But is there any evidence that Judge Sotomayor’s actual legal opinions on matters of race and gender vary from those of the white dude she would replace on the Court, David Souter? In short, no — at least not yet.

The right wants Americans to believe Sotomayor is a “racist.” George Will, using language we’re going to hear a lot of over the next couple of months, insisted that Sotomayor “embraces identity politics,” including the notion that “members of a particular category can be represented — understood, empathized with — only by persons of the same identity.” Pat Buchanan, always a paragon of respect and tolerance, described her as an “affirmative action pick.”

Michael Goldfarb, after scrutinizing Sotomayor’s efforts as an undergrad in 1974, suggested this morning that Sotomayor “has been the recipient of preferential treatment for most of her life.”

And Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) believes, without proof, that Sotomayor’s ability “to rule fairly without undue influence from her own personal race, gender, or political preferences” is in doubt.

Racial politics has only gotten harder to play over the past few decades and, with the Republicans losing millions of voters in every minority demographic year after year, their full-throated demagoguery of a smart, accomplished Latina as some kind of brain-dead affirmative action case is only going to drive minorities further away from the party.

You don’t have to be a political genius to realize that stirring up the tried-and-true dog whistles of oppressed white male grievance in the year 2009 is like playing with a bucket of nitroglycerin balanced on a box of TNT.

The amount of self-inflicted collateral damage the Republican Party is doing to itself right now is truly staggering.

Update: Carrying on with the theme, Republican strategists are wondering how to make light of Judge Sotomayor’s ethnic eating habits (no, I am not shitting you):

Sotomayor also claimed: “For me, a very special part of my being Latina is the mucho platos de arroz, gandoles y pernir — rice, beans and pork — that I have eaten at countless family holidays and special events.”

This has prompted some Republicans to muse privately about whether Sotomayor is suggesting that distinctive Puerto Rican cuisine such as patitas de cerdo con garbanzo — pigs’ tongue and ears — would somehow, in some small way influence her verdicts from the bench.

Curt Levey, the executive director of the Committee for Justice, a conservative-leaning advocacy group, said he wasn’t certain whether Sotomayor had claimed her palate would color her view of legal facts but he said that President Obama’s Supreme Court nominee clearly touts her subjective approach to the law.

“It’s pretty disturbing,” said Levey. “It’s one thing to say that occasionally a judge will despite his or her best efforts to be impartial … allow occasional biases to cloud impartiality.

Update 2: Here’s a little bit more from my favorite sage John Cole:

They can’t even decide to make fun of her for eating Puerto Rican food or paint her as a fancy-pants who only pretends to like it. It reminds me a bit of the mother-sister scene from “Chinatown”: she’s an elitist, no, she’s a wetback, she’s an elitist, no she’s a wetback. SHE’S AN ELITIST AND A WETBACK! It’s hard to see how this is going to work.

Deferring to people’s own pronunciation of their names should obviously be our first inclination, but there ought to be limits. Putting the emphasis on the final syllable of Sotomayor is unnatural in English (which is why the president stopped doing it after the first time at his press conference), unlike my correspondent’s simple preference for a monophthong over a diphthong, and insisting on an unnatural pronunciation is something we shouldn’t be giving in to.