Right Message, Wrong Messenger

[William769]

Ironically, Bush’s approach on immigration is a glimpse into what could have been—centrist politics with broad appeal. But it’s too late for that.

May 19, 2006 - President Bush’s call for a “rational middle ground” on immigration injects a welcome note of sanity into the debate. But that’s not what Bush’s conservative base is looking for. They want red meat, and they won’t be placated by mostly symbolic moves like Bush’s proposal to dispatch the National Guard to the Mexican border and Senate votes to build a partial fence and limit the number of guest workers.

After five and a half years of governing from the irrational exuberant right, Bush’s ability to lead the country on a middle path has been lost. He may have stumbled onto the right message, but he’s the wrong messenger. It’s like his call to break our addiction to oil, which was a line in his State of the Union Message. From a former oilman who as president championed tax breaks for more drilling, it was a brazen left-hand turn, and it went mostly unheeded.

Now we’re in crisis mode with gas prices squeezing Middle America and right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan decrying the “invasion” by illegal immigrants and scaring voters about what he believes is the Mexican government’s secret plan to regain territory it lost in the Mexican-American war in 1848 by repopulating California and the Southwest with Mexican immigrants who will eventually take power through the ballot box. Buchanan, who talks about Bush more in sorrow than in anger, says that the president is trying to re-create the Texas of his youth when Hispanic migration had not yet overwhelmed American border communities. As for Buchanan, he appears to yearn for the homogenous Irish-Catholic neighborhood of his growing-up in a segregated Washington, D.C., in the ’40s and ’50s.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12872191/site/newsweek/