Republican Wedge Issues, 2006 Edition

[kurth]

Republican Wedge Issues, 2006 Edition
By Harold Meyerson

... We have to go back in time to BC (Before Clinton) to find a State of the Union as spiritless and themeless as this one... Indeed, the only case for which Bush summoned his signature cockiness was his argument for warrantless surveillance. "If there are people inside our country who are talkin' with al Qaeda," he said (and the telltale dropped "g" shows that Bush means business), "we want to know about it, because we will not sit back and wait to be hit again." This is, as Karl Rove made clear the week before, the one issue on which the president intends to hit the Democrats again and again. For a president given to attack lines, it was really the only attack line in his entire speech -- a point surely not lost on the increasingly anxious Republican lawmakers in the room.

For, other than Bush's assertion that he's tougher than the Democrats in the post-Sept. 11 world, his speech provided precisely nothing on which Republican members of Congress can campaign this year. Switchgrass? Opposition to hybrid human-animal cloning? (Republicans Oppose "Island of Dr. Moreau"!) Which means they have to come before the voters running on what -- the war? The economy? Health care? Anybody out there got a theme that won't immediately backfire?

I fear they think they do. As their poll numbers continue to decline, I suspect an increasing number of embattled Republican incumbents will campaign for the criminalization of the 11 million undocumented workers in the United States. This will cause a rift with those low-wage employers that are a mainstay of Republican finance (agribusiness and restaurants among them), and won't overjoy party strategists such as Rove, who fear the long-term effect of such campaigns on Latino voting. After all, then-California Gov. Pete Wilson's support for Proposition 187 in 1994, which denied public services to undocumented immigrants and their children, cost the party so much Latino support that the Republicans have been marginalized in that state ever since. But at the time, it also enabled Wilson, who had been trailing in the polls, to win reelection. A war on immigrants might backfire in the long run, but these guys are on the ballot in November.

Warrantless wiretapping and immigrant bashing as the Republican wedge issues of '06? Well, what else can they run on? Their competence? Their ethics?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/03/AR2006020302510.html

[BlueEyedSon]

1. I find when he drops his "g", it means he's lying.....

[WearyOne2]

2. he's lyin most of the time

[Starbucks Anarchist]

3. Or it means he's sober.

When he's drunk, he becomes dyslexic.

[Toots]

4. "we will not sit back and wait to be hit again."

So they did sit back and wait to be hit but not again...We believe you ...honest..We know you would never lie to us. That Lump in your Bed has shown that to be the case..