Off a cliff or out of the desert?
I’m in New York City visiting friends right now, so I haven’t had much time for blogging, but I’ve had lots of time for reading New Yorker political articles on the subway. The recent article about the immigration issue in 2008 is fascinating. We’ve written before that we think that Republicans will make immigration the big issue in Congressional, if not the presidential race. The article makes the case that this is not only irresponsible but also possibly politically disastrous:
Barack Obama, during a recent interview with the editorial board of the Boston Globe, predicted that the Republicans will run next fall on two issues: terrorism and immigration. When I asked a leading Republican strategist and former Bush lieutenant if he agreed, he said merely, “I hope not.†He argued that it was incorrect to think that immigration was the second most important challenge facing the United States. “We need to address other issues, like the economy, health care, and education,†he said. When I asked Tancredo if he was leading his party “over a cliff†or “to the promised land,†he laughed and said, “I see manna out there.â€
The evidence so far, though, points to a cliff. In several election contests in the past two years, Republicans tried and failed to deploy immigration as a campaign weapon. This November, Republicans in Virginia and New York who ran on the issue were defeated. Not even Eliot Spitzer’s misbegotten plan to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, which was thought to be ruinous for Democrats, has damaged the Democratic Party; rather, the Party increased its numbers in local races around the state.
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Far from fearing the immigration issue, some Democratic strategists are quietly cheering how the subject has played out. Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist who has closely studied the politics of the issue, says simply, “The Bush strategy—enlightened on race, smart on immigration, developed in Texas and Florida with Jeb Bush—has been replaced by the Tancredo-Romney strategy, which is demonizing and scapegoating immigrants, and that is a catastrophic event for the Republican Party.â€
Say what you will about the Bushes, the one thing they understand is that a good number of Latinos could be attracted to the Republican party . Why a party would throw that away with rhetoric that strikes most Latinos as jingoistic and racist is beyond me, but it’s happening, and it’s a long-term gift to the Democrats.
I agree. Their big mistake (the Bushies) was not pushing through immigration reform while they still had the political capital to do it. If they’d done that instead of their failed SS privatization plan, the political landscape would be quite different.
Two faced strategy. Here we have the White House ducking the immigration for the purposes of “Latinos could be attracted to the Republican party”…and in the same breath we get mailings from Tom Reynolds warning us of a “hole in the fence” that he’s going to repair. Or are we to believe the GOP who warn us that Pakistani’s are our biggest threat?
If the GOP weren’t so certifiable, they’d actually be funny. But this is one snake you let lose that will come back to bite you (albiet a 3 headed snake).