"The GOP Plan: Go Left on Immigration, Right on Everything Else"

[applegrove]

The GOP Plan: Go Left on Immigration, Right on Everything Else

By Jonathan Chait at NY Magazine

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/01/gop-goes-left-on-immigration-right-on-the-rest.html

"SNIP...............................................



On November 8, two days after the reelection of President Obama and a near sweep of contested Senate seats for the Democratic party, Charles Krauthammer laid out the way forward for his shell-shocked party. In an op-ed column, the writer and talking head bluntly advised his party that it needed one, and only one, ideological adjustment. It needed to adopt immigration reform, including amnesty. Otherwise, the party’s anti-government bromides offered a perfectly suitable ideological platform.

The substantive merits of the advice were questionable. Latinos did not represent the GOP’s only obstacle to winning, and immigration reform did not account entirely even for Latino voting preferences. Nonwhite voters held more liberal positions across the board, and the GOP’s relentless preference for low taxes for the rich over popular social programs played a major role in its political marginalization. Still, the base’s commitment to harsh, inhumane restrictionism is the simplest and — from the standpoint of the party elite, which is generally either indifferent to or supportive of greater immigration — most ideologically painless wound to close. As the party’s response has taken form in recent weeks, it is following Krauthammer’s prescription, almost to the letter.


The key figures leading the way are Paul Ryan, the Republicans’ de facto leader, and Marco Rubio, perhaps its leading presidential candidate. The two have moved generally in tandem, with Rubio leading the way on immigration, but the whole party apparatus has jolted into action. Within days of the election, partisan barometers like Krauthammer and Sean Hannity had announced they had suddenly changed their mind and now favored comprehensive reform. Freed up to cut a deal, Rubio has thrown himself behind a reform plan liberals can happily accept, while he has steadily neutralized every source of conservative discontent. (Hardly a day goes by without some new Republican praising Rubio’s plan.) Crucially, Ryan himself has signaled support for Rubio. The party’s rapid embrace of immigration reform has been a sight to behold, a ruthlessly efficient exercise in partisan calculation.


It is equally clear that the second half of Krauthammer’s prescription — change nothing else — has prevailed. Ryan has led the way here, hammering out the way forward at the House Republican retreat in Williamsburg, and most recently at the National Review Institute gathering last weekend, where he spoke.


.............................................SNIP"

[catbyte]

1. HELLO, morans! Perhaps the Republicans should check out demographic data

for the percentage of the electorate who are women. Keep pushing defunding PP, those heinous "personhood" bills, anti-abortion legislation, oppossing equal pay and the Violencce Against Women Act. They could personally sponsor each undocumented Hispanic person and still they'd lose.

Paul Ryan, Charles Krauthammer, and gang are like an Idiot Savant minus the Savant.

[Still Sensible]

2. Well then, we have nothing to fear

if the GOP is getting its strategy from that dickhead Krauthammer they might as well pack it in.

[backscatter712]

3. The way I see it, the GOP's switched their strategy...

Rather than having the luxury to pick the way they're going to be intransigent, now they're strategizing how they're going to concede issues to us.

I call that progress.