A shrewd political strategy?
The civil war at Polipundit aside, we see a good bit of agreement in the blogosphere and elsewhere about the President’s speech. Powerline didn’t like it, cautious and sober Captain Ed didn’t like it, and even GOP cheerleader-in-chief Hugh Hewitt’s first reaction was overcome by his later reactions. Extreme Mortman has a good roundup.
Perhaps most important as a guage of mainstream GOP opinion, Rush Limbaugh led his program with, in effect, a denunciation of the President’s plan. Though he was careful to state that he saw the speech as the President’s attempt to lead the nation through a thorny issue, he spent most of his first hour condemning the “stupid” Senate bill, using the Heritage Foundation’s figures. Here’s how the Washington Times reported those figures:
The Senate immigration reform bill would allow for up to 193 million new legal immigrants — a number greater than 60 percent of the current U.S. population — in the next 20 years, according to a study released yesterday. “The magnitude of changes that are entailed in this bill — and are largely unknown — rival the impact of the creation of Social Security or the creation of the Medicare program,” said Robert Rector, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who conducted the study. Although the legislation would permit 193 million new immigrants in the next two decades, Mr. Rector estimated that it is more likely that about 103 million new immigrants actually would arrive in the next 20 years.
Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican who conducted a separate analysis that reached similar results, said Congress is “blissfully ignorant of the scope and impact” of the bill, which has bipartisan support in the Senate and has been praised by President Bush. “This Senate is not ready to pass legislation that so significantly changes our future immigration policy,” he said yesterday. “The impact this bill will have over the next 20 years is monumental and has not been thought through.”
The 614-page “compromise” bill — hastily cobbled together last month by Republican Sens. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Mel Martinez of Florida — would give illegal aliens who have been in the U.S. two years or longer a right to citizenship. Illegals who have been here less than two years would have to return to their home countries to apply for citizenship. Although that “amnesty” would be granted to about 10 million illegals, the real growth in the immigrant population would come later. As part of the bill, the annual flow of legal immigrants allowed into the U.S. would more than double to more than 2 million annually. In addition, the guest-worker program in the bill would bring in 325,000 new workers annually who could later apply for citizenship.
We believe that the Senate bill as proposed would be a disaster of the first order for the United States, but that’s not the point of this post. It is at least worth noting that the President’s position has the following political attributes: (a) it got some of the MSM off his back for a moment (eg, the WaPo loved the speech), somewhat in the way signing the BCRA in election-year 2002 did; (b) it beefed up the President’s credentials as a moderate and arguably pro-Hispanic in an election year; and (c) it probably will better his performance in the polls, at least for a little while; and (d) it has taken everyone’s mind off Iraq. This last point seems pretty significant to us.
Not that any of these supposed benefits is worth enraging the Republican base to the extent that President Bush has, mind you. But that brings us to our last thought on the President’s strategy, which we offer mostly, but not entirely, tongue-in-cheek. If the President — with a 29% approval rating — continues to founder in the polls as election day nears, it is not only the Democrats who can run against him in November. The Republican House of Representatives can now do so as well.