One woman’s opinion
Peggy Noonan on the sad state of affairs in the illegal immigration amnesty debate:
What conservatives and Republicans must recognize is that the White House has broken with them. What President Bush is doing, and has been doing for some time, is sundering a great political coalition. This is sad, and it holds implications not only for one political party but for the American future.
The White House doesn’t need its traditional supporters anymore, because its problems are way beyond being solved by the base. And the people in the administration don’t even much like the base. Desperate straits have left them liberated, and they are acting out their disdain. Leading Democrats often think their base is slightly mad but at least their heart is in the right place.
This White House thinks its base is stupid and that its heart is in the wrong place. For almost three years, arguably longer, conservative Bush supporters have felt like sufferers of battered wife syndrome. You don’t like endless gushing spending, the kind that assumes a high and unstoppable affluence will always exist, and the tax receipts will always flow in? Too bad! You don’t like expanding governmental authority and power? Too bad. You think the war was wrong or is wrong? Too bad. But on immigration it has changed from “Too bad” to “You’re bad.”The president has taken to suggesting that opponents of his immigration bill are unpatriotic — they “don’t want to do what’s right for America.” His ally Sen. Lindsey Graham has said, “We’re gonna tell the bigots to shut up.” On Fox last weekend he vowed to “push back.” Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff suggested opponents would prefer illegal immigrants be killed; Commerce Secretary Carlos Gutierrez said those who oppose the bill want “mass deportation.” Former Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson said those who oppose the bill are “anti-immigrant” and suggested they suffer from “rage” and “national chauvinism.”…
If they’d really wanted to help, as opposed to braying about their own wonderfulness, they would have created not one big bill but a series of smaller bills, each of which would do one big clear thing, the first being to close the border. Once that was done — actually and believably done — the country could relax in the knowledge that the situation was finally not day by day getting worse. They could feel some confidence. And in that confidence real progress could begin.
Noonan’s rationale for the behavior of those in the administration is that they are now looking toward the history books and beyond their appalling unpopularity, “trying to lay down markers for history. Having lost the support of most of the country, they are looking to another horizon. The story they would like written in the future is this: Faced with the gathering forces of ethnocentric darkness, a hardy and heroic crew stood firm and held high a candle in the wind. It will make a good chapter. Would that it were true!” The Bush administration would do well to remember that a personal and historical legacy — whatever that might be — is not worth rendering your own political party, to which you owe so much, a shambles.
Ms. Noonan sometimes gets on a high horse when she writes. And sometimes, as in that November 2002 WSJ piece, she has a great and lucid way of crystalizing thoughts. Alas, we think that this analysis is one of the latter.