Has the Senate’s defeat of a comprehensive immigration bill somehow lifted a putrid albatross from around the neck of John McCain? That’s the rapidly congealing conventional wisdom.
McCain has toiled and moiled over immigration for a long time. He’s always had a set of clear principles. But he embraced this ungainly, 4000 page compromise – a product of the Ag Lobby, a weakened White House, Ted Kennedy, Jon Kyl’s best efforts, the quiet help of the Chamber of Commerce, the pragmatic acquiescence of Latino and immigration rights groups – when he could well have stepped away, put his hands up, and fallen back and said he was waiting for a better bill.
But immigration is, like so many subjects, personal to McCain because it represented to him a chance to legislate – to get something done – in Washington for the good of the American people. That idea – that there is amid the gloom and pork and interest-group steel traps of Washington a spark of civility that could, with the right amount of kindling, fuel a grand compromise – really gets him in the gut. And in the first few days after the compromise legislation was unveiled, McCain seemed to take joy in inhabiting the slot of its only national defender.
If the failure of the bill is an indictment of the American political system, as Dan Balz writes today, then it’s also a validation of McCain’s reformational campaign message.
But maybe the bill was just bad. Fearing the right, proponents underestimated the power of the left: labor groups and the wall of opposition from Sen. Byron Dorgan, liberals who urged Senators not to sign on to legislation that would divide families. They also seemed to put too faith in the plain language of the bill, which contained assertive words to describe the various trigger mechanisms but also plenty of ambiguous outs. There was no way – no way in hell, really – that President Bush would allow himself to be associated with a bill that used the power of the federal government to break up Hispanic families and force undocumented immigrants to return to their country of origin and get to the back of the line.
The irony – the sad irony, if you support the bill – is that Americans by and large are inclined toward what amounts to an amnesty, even if they won’t quite associate the word with a “guest worker program.” But the bill’s proponents, in what perhaps was their fundamental error, had no response to the very real cultural dislocation that unchecked immigration was a party to. On the right, they dismissed it as nativism, or perhaps even racism, and even though the bill contained nods in the direction of cultural literacy and English, President Bush, in particular, just could not put himself in the mind of someone who believed that immigration was a non-zero sum game. On the left, arguments about stagnant wage growth were seen as either spurious or non-germane.
If the bill had passed, then the presidential candidate could have only reacted to events, and even some supporters privately predicted an influx of aliens, bureaucratic snafus, clashes at ICE centers. And given how unpopular this bill was with the activist bases of both parties, it was easy to predict a total resentment against its supporters.
So long as it remains on the table, though, it’s an arrow in McCain’s chest. Just because immigration has yet to prove itself a major factor in more than a handful of elections does not at all mean that it never will. To belabor the metaphor, it’s not a fatal wound, and on balance, that the Senate bill won’t be driving the presidential debate is probably OK for McCain. But it’s not a huge gift; why won’t he be continually forced to account for his support of the bill? Why won’t he be probed about his own immigration principles?
Maybe. It's not clear whether immigration is a single-threshold issue for the GOP base. One can easily mistake volume for depth. And if everyone but him as one position -- a position that's favored by, say, half of the Republican base -- and let's assume that at least 40 percent of the base favors McCain -- then the actual political damage that McCain has suffered and will suffer is fairly neglible.
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You need to stop drinking the Inside-the-Beltway Koolaid about public opinion on immigration. I spent 15 years in the marketing research business, and the quality of most of the surveys I've seen trumpeted in the Post and Times about how the public supports amnesty is abysmal: leading questions, unrealistic either-ors, and fundamental misunderstandings of how the public actually thinks about the issue. These surveys are rigged to produce pro-amnesty results, which is why the Beltway media was humiliated this week by events.
http://www.vdare.com/sailer/070528_lies.htm
Posted by Steve Sailer | June 8, 2007 11:32 PM