Lexington's notebook

THERE is no mystery about the Republican Party's ambitions to win more Hispanic votes. Since the presidential election last November, Republicans have been arguing about whether new policies are the key to wooing Latinos, or whether—to borrow an old Ronald Reagan line—Hispanics are conservatives who just don't know it yet. Lots of bigwigs seem to be coming round to the idea of a hybrid approach, combining new policies on immigration with more familiar appeals to piety, love of family and hard work, all of which are hailed as natural Hispanic values.

The Republican debate about the Asian-American vote is at a much earlier stage.

TO CPAC, the Conservative Political Action Conference now in its 40th year. To call the mood serious would not do it justice. The conservatives gathered here are hungry, in the narrow-eyed, intently-focused manner of lions who spent all day stalking prey but missed at the last moment. Not only are they hungry, but they can see a vast, tempting herd on the far horizon: the diverse voter coalition that handed President Barack Obama victory last November.

The conference's opening day has seen open competition between party heavyweights with credible claims to running for the presidential nomination in 2016.

"WE DON'T go around shooting people, the sick people do. They need to be fixed." So said the gun-owning pensioner in the Korean War veteran's hat, demonstrating outside Connecticut's state capitol on March 11th. He was holding a sign reading: "Stop the Crazies—Step Up Enforcement of Current Laws", and like many of the gun-rights supporters rallying in Hartford this week, he wanted to talk about how improving mental health care was the proper response to massacres such as December's school shooting in Newtown, an hour's drive away.

FOR 12 glorious hours, all American conservatives of good conscience were "Rand Paul Republicans" this week. So says the online army that is still in battle formation, long after the tea party-backed senator from Kentucky ended his talking filibuster of the new CIA head's confirmation. Mr Paul stood down after receiving a two-sentence assurance from Eric Holder, the attorney-general, that President Barack Obama does not have the authority to use a "weaponised drone" to kill an American citizen on American soil who is not engaged in combat.

The debate over whether Mr Paul was asking a silly question has been well covered.

MY PRINT column this week looks at political Washington's excited reaction to "House of Cards", a new drama series starring Kevin Spacey as a ruthless and manipulative congressional leader. Among Capitol Hill types tales of binge-viewing abound, and of weekends lost to multi-episode marathons after the makers, Netflix, released the whole series at once.

In the interests of research (and because I don't really like television, so have to take it in concentrated doses, like cod liver oil), Lexington watched all 13 episodes back-to-back. It made for a strange sort of day, but not a boring one.

MY PRINT column this week reports on a striking evolution in the death-penalty debate in America. There have been a spate of successes and partial victories by abolitionists in a string of states. These have ranged from the formal scrapping of capital punishment in five states since 2007 (at one end of the scale of ambition), to legal manoeuvres to block executions by mounting technical challenges to the cocktails of drugs used to kill convicts by lethal injection, at the other. More recently, a series of governors have signalled that they would sign a bill abolishing executions if sent one by their state legislature.