You guys are really missing the point.
If illegal immigration were really such a hot issue then Tancredo would still be in the race. It isn't and he isn't.
The more the candidates blast off with this stuff, the more votes they'll lose.
In the general election they cannot win without the Hispanic vote, which counts heavily in places like Utah, New Mexico, etc. And they are losing that vote heavily, as polls have shown.
TR, it is you who is missing the
reality trying to drive your
point home.
Illegal immigration wasn't so great an issue as to be able to carry Tancredo and his perceived one-note campaign to the nomination. But it is large enough to force all the candidates to address it substantively and for them to alter formerly squishy positions into better defined positions more in accord with Tancredo than Teddy Kennedy...or their former squishy stance.
Your insistence that a broadly popular policy position regarding border enforcement will be a loser does not pass the common sense or laugh tests.
What longeyes described is neither new no unique. The last third of the following article addresses it pretty well:
http://article.nationalreview.com/print/?q=ZWIzYWI4NTBjYTc3NGE1OGEwYWMyZjE1NDZjOWVmMDQ= As the elites pull away from the rest of us, and the rest of us become more atomized and disorganized a heap of loose sand in Sun Yat-sens memorable phrase about the late-Imperial Chinese we may be headed for the kind of intractable elite-commoner hostility predicted by Michael Young in his 1958 book The Rise of the Meritocracy. I dont think it is fanciful to see an element of this in the current widespread anger towards the political class the presidents approval ratings down in the 30s, and Congresss even lower.
Some of that is anger at particular policies Iraq, the immigration bill. Much, though a rising proportion, I believe is systemic: a feeling that the elites are now running the show for their own interests, Latin-America-style, with not much regard for ours. As [one of my readers] correctly observed: The low paid politician has vanished. The surest route to wealth is politics, followed closely by government service.
Here is Paul Johnson in Modern Times:
Like FDR, he [i.e. John F. Kennedy] turned Washington into a city of hope; that is to say, a place where middle-class intellectuals flocked for employment.
What I am seeking is an anti-JFK a candidate who will transform our nations capital from a city of hope for middle-class intellectuals, into a city of despair for them. The despair of those intellectuals, I am increasingly convinced, is the hope of our nation. Looking at all but one of the Republican candidates (and, it goes without saying, all but none of the Democratic ones) I see nothing in prospect but a new draft of office-seeking intellectuals, primed and eager to bring us new expansions of federal power, new pointless wars, new million-strong reinforcements for the Reconquista, new thousand-page tax loopholes, new inducements for idleness and crime, new humiliations for the saps who follow rules and obey laws. Sadly and reluctantly at last, I include the S.O.B.* in that all but one.
* * * * *
From Kimberley Strassels piece in the Dec. 14 Opinion Journal:
Paul rallies heave with voters waving placards and shouting Liberty! Liberty!
Are those supporters crazy, as some colleagues tell me?
Perhaps they are, to be shouting for liberty in 2007, after decades of swelling federal power and arrogance, of proliferating taxes, rules, and interests, of gushing transfers of wealth to politically connected elites from working- and middle-class grunts, of the college and teacher-union scams, of the metastasizing tort-law rackets, of ever more numerous yet ever more clueless intelligence agencies, of open borders and visas for people who hate us, of widening cracks in our sense of nationhood ( Press one for English & ), of speech codes and race lobbies and judicial impositions.
