The immigration debate has been a critical moment in President Bush’s loss of the conservative base, but the reason is greater than the issue itself. We agree with Richard Viguerie up to a point:

Sixty-five months into Bush’s presidency, conservatives feel betrayed. After the “Bridge to Nowhere” transportation bill, the Harriet Miers Supreme Court nomination and the Dubai Ports World deal, the immigration crisis was the tipping point for us. Indeed, a Washington Post-ABC News poll found last week that Republican disapproval of Bush’s presidency had increased from 16 percent to 30 percent in one month. It is largely the defection of conservatives that is driving the president’s poll numbers to new lows….

For all of conservatives’ patience, we’ve been rewarded with the botched Hurricane Katrina response, headed by an unqualified director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which proved that the government isn’t ready for the next disaster. We’ve been rewarded with an amnesty plan for illegal immigrants. We’ve been rewarded with a war in Iraq that drags on because of the failure to provide adequate resources at the beginning, and with exactly the sort of “nation-building” that Candidate Bush said he opposed.

But the dissatisfaction of conservatives goes well beyond particular policy prescriptions. Jed Babbin said it well:

Whatever Clinton said - and he said a lot, almost none of it making any sense or speaking any truth - we reflexively tore into him and his feckless policies. The Clinton era taught us that the faster and more accurate the reaction, the greater the chance of turning the political momentum in our direction. We trained our noses to detect the faintest odor of baloney and reduced our reaction time to the tenths of a second it takes to hit the speed dial on our cell phones.

George W. Bush was never a small government conservative, but we were willing to put up with the bad because it was outweighed by the good he was doing against terrorists. Our habit of cutting Mr. Bush a lot of slack was eroding under the burdens of hundreds of billions in pork and the lack of productive congressional action. It ended abruptly with his announcement of the Harriett Miers nomination to the Supreme Court. It took us less time to figure out why Miers was awful than it did the bloggers to determine that Dan Rather’s Texas Air National Guard documents were forgeries. By the time we were reading the White House’s advance excerpts of the Monday night speech -less than an hour before it was delivered - we’d already concluded that it was another Miers Moment. The reflexive conservative opposition to Clinton is now resurrecting itself and turning against President Bush.

Much of what the president said Monday made good sense. We need to control the border and - given the fact we’ve made too little progress in the past five years - it won’t be done over night. And we can’t throw ten or twelve million people out of our country, so we need to make sure that those who stay become Americans in the traditional sense, or are given some non-citizen status that serves our mutual purposes. If Mr. Bush had said that this year we’ll control our borders and next year deal with guest worker and citizenship issues, he’d have conservatives rallying around him. But he didn’t.

This is exactly correct. Bush’s five-point plan began (via Lou Dobbs): “First, the United States must secure its borders.” Then he proceeded to not do it — indeed he did precisely the opposite. Instead of taking effective steps to secure the border, he served up some warmed over mush about a few National Guardsmen and a bit of fencing. His insincerity was bold, incandescent, and sad.

Trust was the coin of the realm for Bush with the conservative base. They were willing to put up with a lot because they had faith in him as a person, often attributing his mistakes to bad advice or grand strategy or knowledge (particularly on war matters) that was confidential. Lose trust and those excuses get blown away like leaves in a fall storm. He has lost it.

Now the question is whether the GOP senators and congressmen themselves will get blown away like those leaves in the fall.

UPDATE

This immigration issue is of great consequence, and demands honest debate above all other considerations. Mark Helprin in the WaPo:”To what extent is economic advantage sufficient to justify the consequences of the evolving common-law marriage with the countries and cultures of Latin America?…it is a great question, to which the answer must be given by the whole people.” Mark Steyn in the Sun-Times: “In Europe, the political class sowed the seeds of massive social upheaval for the most short-sighted of reasons. If America’s political class wants to do the same, it could at least have the integrity to discuss the issue in honest terms.” That the President dissembled in such an important matter is a mistake of the first order.

UPDATE II

Kate O’Beirne:

A large number of House Republicans could support a well-regulated guest worker program, with a more secure border and a workable workplace enforcement program, but they have no confidence the president’s recent commitment to serious enforcement measures matches their own.

The list of the people who simply do not believe the President get longer and more serious when it includes “a large number of House Republicans.” Don’t blame us, folks, for merely noticing what is going on.

UPDATE III

We’ll take an opportunity to be ecumenical in our criticisms, though we perhaps too pick too easy a target when we name Harry Reid. His characteriztion of English as the national language being “racist” takes it place in his long line of intellectually and morally challenged statements, from Bush being a “loser” to the inability of Clarence Thomas to write and reason. Roger Simon covers the points we’d make very well. What an icky fellow Reid must be.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 21st, 2006 at 9:53 am and is filed under General, New Media, Red Shift, Republicans, art, culture, idiots!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.