Immigration Triangulation Redux

I was wrong. It's true that Bush's moves on immigration were intended to give his congress some breathing room on the right side of an issue-- one that could rally disheartened GOP voters in November. It's not true that he was doing this as another cynical piece of political positioning. If nothing else, Bush has consistently acted on his beliefs. Immigration is the first issue he's come across where his beliefs are nuanced, and where they lie somewhere in the middle of the political spectrum. If ever there were an issue where he is open to discussion, and where he genuinely understands the position of different people, it's this one. This is a disaster for the current Republican political era.

It's to my great relief that we're witnessing the limits of pushing people to extremes in a democracy. It's refreshing that Americans can tire of the Fascist playbook. This wasn't always a foregone conclusion. But now after 6 years of binary scaremongering; framing issues as with us or against us, amnesty, anti-this, pro-that, we're seeing the limits of strategies that encourage people to act out on their fears, and to expect their leaders to follow suit. For the sake of a majority Republican strategists sold their souls to white rural and suburban nativists. They are now unable to deliver on the demands they've accrued. They are up to their eyeballs in political debt.

James Dobson of Focus on the Family, responsible for untold Republican victories since 2000 has publicly voiced his disappointment in the leaders he helped. He's made allusions to a boycott of the November vote by his loyal flock of evangelicals. Dobson was promised a permanant Republican majority that would once and for all push his agenda into the mainstream, eliminating abortion, gay marriage, and writing Christian values into law at every pass. Dobson and his cohort delivered victories and expected results. They were sorely disappointed when they ran up against everyone else who does not subscribe to their beliefs.

For me, it became clear that illegal immigration is a much more sensitive issue than I'd realized when my wife and I took a trip to some state parks in Alabama last Sunday. After a tour of some caverns, the guide stopped a family who was strolling into the cave unguided and without tickets. No one in the group spoke English. I offered to talk to them, and explained the rules of the game. The guide and the family were all nice about it, but this lack of understanding one another, the lack of following the rules, pointed towards a simmering tension in rural places.

Driving through small Alabama towns that day, we saw lines of bodegas, restaurants, and collections of people who weren't there even five years ago. It was people who were undocumented, who did not understand what life in Alabama means to the natives, and it was people who represented a threat of competition for increasingly scarce economic resources, and a harbinger of the destruction of their values. To many small town people, they are illegals in every moral sense. It was no mystery that rural Alabamians should be raising such a fuss over what seemed to me, coming from the city, as nothing new. It was really remarkable how rural an issue this is, and how little it would have mattered if these were another generation of immigrations who melted into the shadowy alleys and basement apartments of cities. People who had been so accustomed to the homogeneity of small town traditional life are confronting terrifying changes.

Rural Alabamians may choose any side they please in arguing their beliefs. They may support the full militarization of the Mexican border, felonization and deportation of illegals who are already here, and whatever else they call an adequate respone. We are free to denounce them as small-minded xenophobes, bigots, or whatever we please and to call for the normalization of the 12 million illegals' status as American workers and tax payers. It remains that they are experiencing traumatic changes to their towns that we are not. Rural Alabamians will react to the situation in the ways that they deem appropriate, and will demand that their leaders echo that reaction with policy.

After years of coddling people's fears for political advantage, Republicans are at risk of being unable to respond with decisive action to a situation that demands negotiation of a number of social, logistical and economic issues. Rural Alabamians have become used to a president and a congress that will allay fear with action, right or wrong. It's amnesty or deportation for them; no waffling is permitted in the face of crisis. Immigration is an issue that will not go away for anyone, but it is one where unlike terrorism, the case for crisis does not resonate with most Americans.

By relying on the uncompromising moralistic instincts of a certain type of voter, the Republican leadership has painted itself into a corner. That uncompromising voter knows that their leaders can't or won't deliver what they want. For the uncompromising voter, 6000 troops to the border looks more like condescent than descisive action, or even the compromise they abhor as weak. That voter will not come to the polls unless they are given what they demand. Republicans may lose hold of a middle they had to stretch to reach, and be left with only the zealots who have no choice but to act on the uniform demands of their safely gerrymandered districts. Incumbency can be marginalizing too.

Still, having only the choice between two parties brings its own frustration. I wish congressional districts were carved out on some objective process, rather than the explicitly divisive, implicitly racist way we do it now. Putting aside all political beliefs, I wish we had leaders who were working for us, and not their parties-- neither of which seem to exist for anything other than their own sakes'.

so sick of our leaders

Tonight, the evening news ran the following stories:

Dick Cheney goes to Russia and pisses off the Kremlin by accusing them of strong-arming and repression.

The Senate passes an emergency spending bill that is $14 billion over Bush's limit, and faces a veto, while the house (all the same party) sides with the president. The spending bill is necessary to pay for the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, along with hurricane relief.

The Senate has cleared another version of a constitutional ammendment banning flag-burning as midterm elections near and things don't look so good for them.

Outgoing White House press secretary Scott McClellan tells us that Bush couldn't have sung the Spanish Star Spangled Banner during the 2000 campaign because his Spanish isn't good enough.

The president celebrates Cinco de Mayo a day early due to scheduling conflicts.

Donald Rumsfeld gets caught in a lie about what he said about WMD's in 2003 by hecklers at a speech here in Atlanta.

Narrowly approved house ethics bill makes slight changes to lobbyist disclosure procedures.

Representative Patrick Kennedy crashes his car in Capitol Hill sometime before dawn. Questions arise about his sobriety, and whether proper police procedure was followed.

Al Qaeda in Iraq leader Al Zarqawi (still evading capture) is shown in sneakers, bumbling with a machine gun by the US military as part of an effort to make him look bad.

Oil Prices are down, the Dow is up.

Baghdad bombing kills twelve.

I can't believe the news today.

I'm beginning to feel like Richard Pryor in Brewster's Millions. Ready to vote for None of the Above this November.