I have a piece in The Washington Times today, and welcome your reactions to it. To me, the topic of illegal immigration - if not handled properly by the GOP - has the potential to split our party, and I'm not sure that eastern Republicans understand that. I certainly didn't until I moved to California six years ago.
Of course, discontent with the status quo won't drive Republicans to vote for Hillary in 2008. But it could elicit support for some Ross Perot-like third-party candidate that would be sufficient to allow a Democrat to slide into office with only a plurality (remember the first election of the first Clinton?).
So it's a problem of which the national Republicans need to be aware.
Of course, discontent with the status quo won't drive Republicans to vote for Hillary in 2008. But it could elicit support for some Ross Perot-like third-party candidate that would be sufficient to allow a Democrat to slide into office with only a plurality (remember the first election of the first Clinton?).
So it's a problem of which the national Republicans need to be aware.
posted by LadybugUSA at 8:44 AM
1 Comments:
Good piece, Carol. Thank you for writing it. You were right to sound the warning.
Part of the problem is George W. Bush himself, I think. Push the man on immigration reform and you almost always get frijoles about the American Dream and a reassuring anecdote to the effect of "I was governor of a border state; I get it."
But what we Californians (and Arizonans) see is not that Bush gets it, but that his proposed "guest worker" visa is bound to be interpreted as amnesty.
Meanwhile, the ineffectual Vicente Fox gets invitations to the ranch in Crawford rather than pointed queries along the lines of "what have you done for me lately?"
Another part of the problem is that the Republican establishment is intimidated by Hispanic activist groups. On the east coast, they tend to forget what people like Victor Davis Hanson and Michael Savage do not, which is that many Hispanic-Americans themselves see illegal immigration as a problem. They're the ones to listen to, not MECHA and La Raza.
Anyone know where Alberto Gonzales stands on all this?
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