Huckabee Would Abolish Birthright Citizenship

Cross-posted at The Right's Field.

Soren Dayton observes that Mike Huckabee seems to have flip-flopped on immigration. Whereas at one time Huckabee endorsed comprehensive immigration reform and said that opposition to such reform was "driven by just sheer racism," now he has indicated that he would abolish a core American principle: birthright citizenship:

" ‘I would support changing that. I think there is reason to revisit that, just because a person, through sheer chance of geography, happened to be physically here at the point of birth, doesn’t necessarily constitute citizenship,’ he said. ‘I think that’s a very reasonable thing to do, to revisit that.’ "

This is a naked appeal to the sheer racism of the kind of people who rant about "anchor babies," and while Huckabee may see an immediate political advantage in it -- as Dayton notes, it's just the kind of thing that'll help him pull in the Paul/Tancredo crowd -- it undermines his core utility to the GOP.

The reason I've long considered Huckabee so dangerous to Democrats, besides his personal charm and speaking skills, is that his politics represent the best chance for Republicans to rebuild an enduring majority coalition. As a Baptist minister who speaks the social justice language of the emerging constituency of liberal and moderate evangelicals, he's in a position to secure and expand the evangelical vote for Republicans just when the party is in danger of losing its advantage there. And his "Main Street over Wall Street" rhetoric, combined with his defense of government and his willingness to talk (somewhat) honestly about taxes (FairTax aside), is perfectly in tune with the American mainstream, who remain uninterested in the fiscal conservative orthodoxy to which most Republican candidates feel they have to chain themselves. If Barack Obama is trying to run to the center and move it left, Mike Huckabee is trying to run to the center and move it right.

But if Huckabee is going to violate his own religious beliefs and sell himself out to the nativist crowd, he risks surrendering all these advantages. Anti-immigrationism, as intoxicating as Republicans find it, is the route to a long-term GOP minority, not a majority. Maybe Huckabee is eager to consolidate whatever gains he achieved in Ames by going after cheap support. But that support will come at a dear long-term cost for Huckabee and his party.

Labels: 2008, immigration, Mike Huckabee, Presidential election

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:36 AM 0 comments

  The Immigration Quandary

Returning to the question of "Movement 2.0" -- Ruffini and Dayton, while they seem understandably intrigued by the galvanizing possibilities, for conservatives, of a Hillary Clinton nomination, nonetheless recognize that Hillary hatred would not suffice as an ideological basis for a new movement. They go on to review a number of issues around which such a movement could potentially be organized.

The approach is interesting in how it seems to reflect a very common pattern of instrumentalist thinking among conservatives. In other words: here are two conservatives saying, "we need a movement -- what issues can we use to build it?" It seems to me that the liberal habit is the opposite: "We need health care -- how can we get it?" This is a gross oversimplification, of course, but I do think it has something to do with why conservatives have shown such a genius for politics -- for them, politics is the point; ideas are the means. In its more vulgar forms this instrumentalism manifests, for instance, as the "Konservetkult" culture war mentality so vividly described by Brad Reed and Roy Edroso; this is the mentality that brought us such joys as the Half Hour News Hour and the "Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs of All Time." Ruffini and Dayton are serious thinkers, not themselves prey to such mania; it's just interesting, on the larger level, how a useful adaptation (a flair for politics) can mutuate into a serious deformity.

With that long aside out of the way, let's briefly consider the first instrument in the new movement's potential arsenal of ideas. Ruffini says:

Even if Movement 2.0 is two or more years away, there are things we should be doing now to prepare. At this point in the Clinton years, MoveOn had already started. Perhaps the analog to that is the immigration issue, where the right kicked ass. But, again, what did we create with the immigration issue? Where is the million person email list of people who got involved because of immigration, and can now be activated on other issues? It sounds like people were thinking of the right techniques for radio, but not for online.

I can understand why conservative activists are tempted to see immigration as an issue upon which they can build. After all, in a pretty bad year for the right, it's where they scored their most significant victory. It fires up the base and it can be milked for patriotism points.

At the same time, I'm astounded. The victory was tactical, not strategic. Conservative activists forced Congressional members of their own party to react to the demands of the base and kill the immigration bill, even though the bill's provisions were broadly popular among the general public. And, of course, achieving the "victory" meant months of noisy activism that put the rather vicious bigotry of so much of the Republican base on public display, even as the party's more sober thinkers have realized that, if it cannot expand beyond white Christian nationalism, the GOP is doomed to long-term minority status. Thus Dayton says:

Yesterday, one of the stand-ins at Andrew Sullivan’s blog argued that perhaps we could add African-Americans through railing on immigration. I, personally, find the idea both morally repugnant and unlikely to succeed. We want to get African-Americans back by increasing racist sentiment? Probably not a winner. Nevermind that we would lose our Hispanics, so it might not even add votes. And business wouldn’t tolerate a protectionist agenda....

Another [option] would be to try to organize and reach out to Hispanics. Bush tried that with immigration, and the party revolted. (wrongly, in my opinion).

Dayton is entirely correct. The experience of "victory" seems to have confused very many conservative activists and pundits, but if they don't pay close attention to the bigger picture, that victory will be Pyrrhic (more than it already was). Immigration is an issue that divides the existing Republican coalition, prevents outreach to a crucial new constituency (and no matter how much conservatives reassure themselves that "a lot of Hispanics oppose illegal immigration too," there's simply no way the GOP can act on the issue without unleashing the bigotry that will cost them even those Hispanic votes), and puts them on the wrong side of majority opinion. I can't see how any sensible conservative could possibly imagine that it would make a useful issue for a Movement 2.0.

Labels: conservative futures, immigration, Patrick Ruffini, Soren Dayton

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 7:23 AM 1 comments

  Immigration: What Cost Victory?

In a Washington Times op-ed, Linda Chavez calls the defeat of the immigration bill a "Pyrrhic victory" for conservatives:

Our borders will be less secure, not more. Employers who want to do the right thing and only hire legal workers won't have the tools to do so. The 12 million illegal aliens here now will continue to live in the shadows, making them less likely to cooperate with law enforcement to report crimes and less likely to pay their full share of taxes. In other words, the mess we created by an outdated and ill-conceived immigration policy 20 years ago will just get worse.

But you won't hear this if you tune in to talk radio over the next few days or read conservative blogs. There will be lots of gloating over having killed "amnesty." There will be claims that senators finally "listened to the people." And, no doubt, some conservatives will be emboldened to consider the next step in their war against illegal immigration, namely to deport those now here illegally.

Chavez, whose heresies on the immigration issue have helped draw out some of the vicious racism of the Republican base, warns that Democrats will be planning to revisit the issue in 2009, with what could be expanded control over both the legislative and executive branches. And she thinks they'll be right to do so, given the myriad contradictions and failures of current immigration policy.

What Chavez sees is a conservative noise machine grown fat and happy after its latest "triumph," oblivious to the consequences its short-term actions will have in the longer run. She argues that "Republicans who believe this will help them at the polls in 2008 may find themselves sitting on the back benches for years to come."

At this point, it probably doesn't even matter whether anyone else on the right is listening to her. On immigration, at least, the damage to the Republican coalition has been done.

Labels: immigration, Linda Chavez, Washington Times

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:51 AM 0 comments

  And Yet Civilization Survives

Is it just me, or does this seem rather overblown? John Leo writes that sociologist Robert Putnam (of "Bowling Alone" fame) is "very nervous" about releasing data he's accumulated suggesting that diversity reduces social cohesion within a community:

In the 41 sites Putnam studied in the U.S., he found that the more diverse the neighborhood, the less residents trust neighbors. This proved true in communities large and small, from big cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, and Boston to tiny Yakima, Washington, rural South Dakota, and the mountains of West Virginia. In diverse San Francisco and Los Angeles, about 30 percent of people say that they trust neighbors a lot. In ethnically homogeneous communities in the Dakotas, the figure is 70 percent to 80 percent.

Diversity does not produce “bad race relations,” Putnam says. Rather, people in diverse communities tend “to withdraw even from close friends, to expect the worst from their community and its leaders, to volunteer less, give less to charity and work on community projects less often, to register to vote less, to agitate for social reform more, but have less faith that they can actually make a difference, and to huddle unhappily in front of the television.”

I live in one of those "diverse" places. Anyone "huddl[ing] unhappily" in front of the television (and how does Putnam know that they do it "unhappily"?) is missing out on a lot, but more to the point: when you think about it, how is this data so astonishing? Of course people living in small, homogeneous towns in the Dakotas feel they have more in common with their neighbors, and act accordingly. But -- and no offense meant to any readers in those states, honestly -- who wants to live in a small homegeneous town in the Dakotas? All I mean is, "to each his own" is a phrase that cuts more than one way.

And on another level: community cohesion and solidarity are important, but it's a diverse, cosmopolitan world, and aren't the kinds of cohesion and solidarity that can't/won't account for that fact often the kinds of cohesion and solidarity you don't want to see?

Labels: City Journal, immigration, Robert Putnam

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 8:14 AM 1 comments

  Linda Chavez's Adventures in the World of the Blindingly Obvious

Right-wing writer Linda Chavez is finding herself increasingly uncomfortable with the fact that so many of her fellow conservatives are, not to put too fine a point on it, overt racists. In an article for Townhall a couple of weeks ago, Chavez decried the right's culture of hating on the Hispanics:

Some people just don't like Mexicans -- or anyone else from south of the border. They think Latinos are freeloaders and welfare cheats who are too lazy to learn English. They think Latinos have too many babies, and that Latino kids will dumb down our schools. They think Latinos are dirty, diseased, indolent and more prone to criminal behavior. They think Latinos are just too different from us ever to become real Americans.

No amount of hard, empirical evidence to the contrary, and no amount of reasoned argument or appeals to decency and fairness, will convince this small group of Americans -- fewer than 10 percent of the general population, at most -- otherwise. Unfortunately, among this group is a fair number of Republican members of Congress, almost all influential conservative talk radio hosts, some cable news anchors -- most prominently, Lou Dobbs -- and a handful of public policy "experts" at organizations such as the Center for Immigration Studies, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA, in addition to fringe groups like the Minuteman Project.

The post kicked up the predictable shitstorm, as Chavez documented in a follow-up post that features some of the more charming examples of the Townhall crowd's reaction:

On Townhall.com, these delightful bon mots appeared (I've preserved the original spelling and punctuation):

• "Mexicans are pigs"


• "They can be referred to as: Human Locusts."


• "Latino girls are baby factories. They fornicate like animals with no regard for the welfare of the child. Babies having babies while the boy goes out and screws someone else. Most latinos are liars. True again. Look at the corruption at all levels of the mexican government and it carries on to all the people."


• "Quickly, the fact is that we're being invaded by an inferior culture. Every person of low quality we import plants a family-tree that bears low-quality fruit. The rotten fruit of that tree will rot our own fruit."


• "We don't want spanish speaking little retards befouling our great country. REMEMBER SAN HACINTO1"


• "And YES ,Illegals are lazy, disease infested, freeloading moochers. The fact they criminally enter the country automatically qualifies them as lazy freeloaders."


• "Get a clue Chavez...we dont want wetbacks mooching our system and NO we dont need them. They are simply slave labor.nothing more."


• "most Mexicans, especially men, are lazy good for nothing drunks who only care about sacking as many mujeres that they can."

I could go on; there are more than 300 posts on Townhall and hundreds more on less mainstream sites, but you get the point. It's hard to imagine that anyone could get away with posting such foul comments about blacks, or Jews, or gay people on a mainstream website.

It's appropriate, then, that Chavez's next target is the National Review, whose contributors (upholding the magazine's long tradition of racism) have been writing the recipes for the red meat that gets thrown to the angry Townhall-dwelling hounds of the conservative "base." In particular, she goes after John Derbyshire (for his insistence on referring to Mexicans as "Aztecs," and not in a solidarity-with-La-Raza kind of way), and Heather Mac Donald, who just can't stop making shit up.

It's almost certainly a losing battle for Chavez. She laments:

There are only so many times that you can be told to “go back to Mexico” and far worse before your blood starts to boil (and I’m talking about thousands of such responses over the last year). The immigration debate has stirred up some pretty ugly sentiments and conservatives need to be especially careful in this regard. We are, after all, the ones who argue for colorblind policies.

We'll set aside the thick layer of hypocrisy surrounding the "colorblind" claim. For those who wonder why immigration seems to divide the right so much more than the left, I submit that it has a lot to do with the fact that it's on the right one sees so many of the sentiments Chavez documents above. Pretty damn obvious, really.

Labels: immigration, Linda Chavez, National review, racism

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:09 PM 0 comments

  Impaled by Immigration Again

People keep pointing out -- correctly -- that immigration is an issue that should divide Democrats as well as Republicans. Yet it's the Republicans who keep finding themselves on the pointy end of the wedge.

In part that probably has to do with the parties' contrasting philosphies - differences over the issue are mitigated somewhat when everyone agrees on the importance of unionization and a strong social safety net. But it also has to do with political circumstances -- specifically, the role of a Republican White House dedicated to the pursuit of Hispanic votes (if no longer for itself, then for its own strategists' plan for the future of the GOP national majority).

Conservative pundits are looking at the McCain-Kennedy bill with alarm (though, to be fair, the bill has critics from across the political spectrum). At NRO, for instance, the Editors are freaking out over the notion that the bill's "probationary status" and "extreme hardship" provisions will effectively grant amnesty to undocumented aliens the very day the bill passes, regardless of the administration's claims about enforcement; Stanley Kurtz, meanwhile, thinks the fiendishly clever Ted Kennedy is suckering Republicans by promising them a move from family-based immigration to a skills-based points system that will never actually happen.

Whatever becomes of the current bill, on a larger level the Republicans continue to find themselves on the horns of rather ugly dilemma. It isn't the philosophical debate causing them so much trouble, of course, it's the political problem. Fred Siegel compares the issue to the Dubai ports controversy, in that once again "the Bush administration seems to be undermining its own core principles by failing to put security first." That analysis does beg the question of whether "putting security first" really is the administration's core principle, as opposed to, say, political self-interest (it also begs the question of whether "security" is really the best paradigm from which to approach the issue). Still, it's an interesting comparison inasmuch as one could argue that, either way, both cases involve the White House acting irrationally against its own prime directive.

An anonymous NRO contributor illustrates the supposed political irrationality at work in a satirical "memo" from one "H. Dean to HRC." This mysterious Mr. Dean is delighted by the Bush administration's support for immigration reform, arguing that "the Republicans are handing us the future on a silver platter.... The 'bi-partisan McCain-Kennedy plan' seemed almost deliberately designed to help Democrats and hurt Republicans." Why?

First and foremost, most Hispanics are Democrats.... The record shows that since the Second World War, the Hispanic community has supported Democrats for president ranging from a high of nearly 90 percent for their fellow Catholic JFK to a low of 60 percent for Mondale, McGovern, and Kerry, for an average of roughly 2 to 1 Democratic. So any amnesty plan will create more Democratic than Republican voters in the foreseeable future. It took the last wave of Catholic immigrants — from the Irish famine refugees of the 1840s and Southern/Eastern workers of the post-Civil War era — nearly a century to consider voting Republican for Ike in the 1950s. Now a similar scenario is being set up again.

Morevoer, the issue divides Republicans and will undoutedly lead to more business support for Democrats. What does it all add up to?

The likely end result of this will be a nasty fight in the Republican primaries of 2008, an alienated business community, very few Hispanic Republicans, more Democrats, and a depressed GOP base. The textbook definition of a disaster is getting the worst of all worlds.

Ross Douthat argues that Bush's strategists correctly diagnosed the GOP's major problem, but they've prescribed the wrong cure:

The GOP can build a political majority around the married, Middle-American middle class, but not if it remains a lily-white party: It needs larger percentages of the Hispanic and yes, the African-American vote to offset the growing Democratic advantage among white, socially-liberal Bobo voters who might have been Reaganites a generation ago.... Bush's insight in this regard was correct, but his strategy for winning a larger share of the minority vote rests on three wobbly pillars - gay marriage, which won him Ohio in '04 but won't be a national issue for much longer; the war, which worked until it became clear how badly he mismanaged it; and amnesty for illegal immigrants, which is aimed at precisely the wrong part of the Hispanic demographic. There's no evidence that middle-class Hispanics, the people the GOP needs to woo, are likely to reward the Republicans for legalizing millions of maids, dishwashers, and migrant laborers, and the migrant laborers themselves certainly aren't going to vote for the GOP anytime soon.

And thus we arrive at the Big Question that seems to drive much of the right's internal debate over immigration: are Hispanics natural Democrats or natural Republicans? Douthat suggests that "they're like any immigrant population, natural Democrats while they're in the barrio and natural Republicans once they've reached the suburbs." Our anonymous satirist, on the other hand, argues that "even if Rove’s vision of middle class Hispanics eventually turning Republican is true, at best, they’ll be a swing vote replacing older whites in the Sun Belt who have voted 2-1 Republican in the last generation."

It's unclear what the anonymous paleocon would have Republicans do to combat their central demographic problem -- though he doesn't in fact appear to view it as a problem in itself. It's not that he doesn't explicitly acknowledge that the GOP is a "white Christian" party; he seems to believe that this is the party's strength, and the more Republicans seek to diversify their party, the more they will alienate their base. This is undoubtedly true in the short term, but it's this short-term calculation that is crippling the Bush administration's effort to plan for the long-term health of the GOP coalition.

And here let's return to the wider project of compassionate conservatism, which was designed to solve a number of political dilemmas for the Republicans. Some of these were immediate -- for instance the need for Bush to disassociate himself from unpopular Republican congressional leaders. But some were long-term, particularly two linked issues: changing American demographics and the public's rejection of Republican anti-government ideology. The strategy has largely failed because of its own inherent limitations, but also because it comprehensively antagonized so much of the Republican establishment, which establishment was itself the product of 40 years of anti-government, pro-white Christian movement-building. I don't think it's much of a stretch to say that the current immigration debate is one last reprise of the right's Wars of Compassionate Conservatism.

The big question, though: if the conflict has been a conservative civil war, which side represents the Lost Cause?

Labels: Bush administration, conservatives, immigration, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 10:15 AM 0 comments

  As the Immigration Worm Turns

The immigration issue continues to plague Republican candidates. Under the strain, Mitt Romney recently did what he does best in times of trouble: he flip-flopped:

"I don't think there should be a special pathway to citizenship for those that are here illegally," he said. "It makes no sense at all to have a border which is basically concrete against skill and education but wide open to people to just walk on in who have neither."

That position sets the former Massachusetts governor apart from a major rival, Arizona Senator John McCain, as well as President George W. Bush, both of whom back a guest-worker plan that gives undocumented workers the opportunity to become U.S. citizens. It also sets him apart from some of his own former positions.

Bolded text = LOL.

Another paragraph caught my eye:

Romney's decision to shift his stand demonstrates how a big issue sometimes boils up from the voters, forcing candidates to adjust their messages. "For Republicans it's immigration; for Democrats it's trade," Illinois Democratic Rep. Rahm Emanuel (news, bio, voting record) said March 28 at the American Society of Newspaper Editors meeting in Washington. "Both issues reflect the unease Americans feel about the effects of globalization."

Good to see Rahm acknowledging the need for the Dems to account for their constituents' concerns on trade. And if Romney needs to change his tune on immigration, so be it. But - and I say this without actually looking at polling data, so I could be off base - it seems to me to be a case of two very different situations. Republicans are being pushed by their base to take a stance on immigration that will actually harm them electorally, while the Democratic base is pushing the party toward a more popular trade policy than the one they had previously embraced.

Labels: 2008, Democrats, immigration, Mitt Romney, Presidential election, Republicans, trade

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 11:59 AM 0 comments

  Immigration: Playing with Matches

A couple of years ago, I was doing opposition research for a candidate for Congress out in western New York. I had at my disposal a copy of the Frank Luntz playbook, which had recently been disseminated online. If you haven't read it, I recommend you take a look sometime. The specifics are a bit dated but the techniques are classic Luntz - it's a window into the mind of the GOP Congressional delegation's communications guru. (Sample line: "Remember, it's NOT drilling for oil. It's responsible energy exploration.")

One thing that wasn't in the memo was how to talk about immigration. But we knew that Luntz and other GOP strategists were planning to use it as their new wedge isssue, just as they had done with gay marriage in the previous cycle. Eventually, Luntz's memo on how to talk about immigration turned up, full of the same kind of carefully-crafted talking points. Luntz insisted that "Americans are not only ready for an overhaul of illegal immigration policy, they are demanding it."

But in one of their more significant political blunders of recent years, Republicans failed to foresee that they would be the ones who ended up getting wedged.

Luntz never quite grasped the way the immigration debate would play out. In his playbook, he insisted on the importance of nationalizing the 2006 elections - drawing a lesson from the GOP setback of 1986, he called for an "umbrella effort to unite voters across the country to keep Republicans in office." Getting bogged down in local issues would be disastrous. Meanwhile, Luntz claimed that his focus groups were going wild over immigration.

His warnings were directed against a Republican establishment that many conservatives feared was out of step with the party's base on this issue. But that establishment - specifically, Rove's White House - saw the field in a way Luntz and his Congressional clients could not. Immigration was not a properly national issue; it was something that resonated very differently in different parts of the country. And it threatened to undercut one of the Rovian/Compassionate Conservative faction's most cherished projects: winning the Hispanic vote and creating the permanent Republican majority.

By ramping up the immigration debate, the Luntzian faction agitated part of the conservative base - thus in turn forcing the hands of many Republican members of Congress from conservative districts. But the numbers never added up to anything but trouble for the national party. The White House, with a very different set of interests, would never give the crackdown crowd what they wanted. It became a disastrous self-fulfilling prophesy for the party's pundits and Congressional delegation, who set the base on fire, only to be themselves consumed by the flames.

And the issue still smolders. Newt Gingrich, who is a master of political rhetoric but sometimes a remarkably incompetent strategist, is putting an English-only proposal at the center of his non-campaign campaign. Debate continues on the right (see this Max Boot thread at Contentions), and the tone suggests that conservatives are deeply frustrated by the dilemma they've caused for themselves.

Meanwhile, Chris Bowers has pointed out that 2006 saw a thirty point shift among Latinos to the Democratic party. To stick with the metaphor from above, Luntz and the other GOP strategists who encouraged the immigration alarmists tried to burn down the Democrats' house - without realizing that, on immigration, their own party was far more flammable.

Labels: Frank Luntz, immigration, Republicans

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 1:55 PM 2 comments

  Die, Blogger, Die

And no, I don't mean "The, Blogger, The." So I missed a tag in the Think Tank Review and thus lost half my post, along with an hour and a half I could have spent in all kinds of other, less thinky activities.

I know, save your work, and I also know, stop complaining and get off Blogger already. Still.

So the post was reconstructed to include the main piece. What was lost? Short versions:

"Make English our Official Language": Newt Gingrich thinks the linguistic sky is falling, but doesn't produce any evidence that Americans are particularly culturally fragmented, nor does he propose a solution to the real problem with ESL education: the fact that "over 90% of the need for English as a Second Language classes goes unmet." (Link via The Right's Field.) His list of recommendations seems to be aimed not at solving a policy problem but at reasserting a conservative voice in the immigration debate. And you can't help but notice that it also seems intended to depress immigrant (and thus Democratic) voter turnout.

"Tortured Credibility": Anne Applebaum turns up - at the AEI website! - to denounce the use of torture from a practical perspective. She points out that the Khalid Sheik Mohammed "confessions" have been met with indifference and skepticism around the world. And even if he wasn't tortured, the extrajudicial means used to confine and interrogate him undermine the legitimacy of any confession. The lesson?

[I]t is not merely immoral to operate outside the rule of law; it is also ineffective and in fact profoundly counterproductive: There is no proof that it produces better information but plenty of evidence that it has discredited the United States.

Given AEI's influence in conservative policymaking circles, it's heartening to see this piece at their website.

Labels: Blogger sux, immigration, Newt Gingrich, Right Wing Think Tank Review, torture

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 12:22 PM 0 comments

  Republicans in Disarray, Redux

This banner ad is at the top of NRO today:


Over at the Stop Martinez site, the battle cry is: "Mel Martinez is Spanish for Harriet Miers." In other words, the anti-Martinez movement is presenting itself as a grassroots conservative revolt against a Beltway-supported RINO - but this time it's all about immigration.

RNC member Denise McNamara puts it this way:

Why, you may ask, are the grassroots conservative base of the Texas Republican Party so adamantly opposed to Senator Martinez’ nomination? One word: Amnesty. [...]

Opponents of Senator Martinez have other objections, including the fact that he is a sitting Senator. How are we going to win the ’08 election with a part-time RNC Chairman? The arrangement will be that he is the “General Chairman,” and the day-to-day Chairman, Mike Duncan, will handle the RNC operations. With Hillary looming on the horizon, now is not the time to outsource the chairmanship of the RNC.

But the primary objection to Martinez is that he authored the Hagel-Martinez Immigration Reform Bill in the U.S. Senate in 2006. [emphasis mine]

The site quotes Steve Sailer, of the racist website vdare.com, in a half-hearted attempt to show that the election of an Hispanic-American as RNC Chair would do nothing to improve the GOP's performance among Latino voters. They don't really pursue the point, though, and one gets the clear impression that they really don't care about - or even want - Latino votes.

This is a revolt by the viciously anti-immigrant wing of the Republican party that was soundly defeated at the polls last November. They seem well-organized, but they'll have little actual impact. From the Miami Herald:

Martinez's supporters -- and even some critics -- say the opposition is unlikely to derail his election.

Several states are opposed, ''but I don't think it's going to be significant,'' said RNC member Randy Pullen, who is running for chairman of the Arizona Republican Party and plans to vote against Martinez. ``I like Senator Martinez . . . I just wish from our perspective along the border that his position on immigration was different.''

Republican Party of Florida chairwoman Carole Jean Jordan, who has campaigned on Martinez's behalf, said she expects the dissenters to be vastly outnumbered.

''You get this, maybe a half dozen people out of hundreds of votes, and it's fine, it's freedom of speech,'' Jordan said.

Still, it's a real sign of the deep and still-active faultline over immigration in the GOP. As with the Christian right, Republican leaders find themselves faced with a vocal and organized segment of the party base, whose demands could be politically disastrous for Republicans when the general elections roll around.

Labels: Denise McNamara, immigration, Mel Martinez, Republicans, RNC, Steve Sailer

  ¶ Posted by Paul Curtis 2:49 PM 0 comments