February 14, 2008
The primary season hasn’t been kind to Lou Dobbs. After spending the last few years beating the drums for a nationwide political insurrection, CNN’s favorite alarmist must face up to the fact that voters have rejected his polemics in which global trade and immigration are the twin evils threatening America.
Indeed, the failure of supporters of his views to gain control of either major party was enough for poor Lou to want to dump cold water on the red-hot primary season. Many of us who have looked on his jeremiads with increasing dismay are merely answering: “Amen!”
While the Democrats will battle on into the summer, the Republican outcome is no longer in any real doubt. In particular, Mitt Romney, the last of the viable presidential candidates who thought an attack on illegal immigration was the ticket to success, conceded Sen. John McCain’s eventual nomination.
Along with the last two Democrats standing — Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton — McCain had specifically opposed the anti-immigration hysteria that has become one of the major issues of the year, if not the decade. As a cosponsor of a sane, if ultimately doomed, attempt to reform the current unworkable immigration legal system, he was widely pronounced dead in the water last year specifically because he had gone “liberal” on immigration.
That he was joined in this heresy by other noted “left-wingers” such as President Bush and the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal did not deter the talk radio hosts or the wilder members of the pundit class, such as the execrable Anne Coulter (who claims she will “campaign” for Hillary Clinton to demonstrate her disdain for McCain). They labeled him a traitor to his party for suggesting that 12 million people who were currently here without permission could not just be deported, and that the only economically rational and humane answer was to offer this population a path to citizenship.
Though McCain has wandered off the GOP reservation at times (most lamentably, with a campaign finance reform scheme that does nothing to help the problem it sought to solve while undermining free-speech rights), immigration was something different. To what seemed to be the majority of the Republican electorate, the charge of offering “amnesty” for illegals was supposed to be a third-rail offense in 2008. This was the year that nativism was going to triumph.
That was, at any rate, exactly what Romney and Rudy Giuliani, whom national polls showed as the leading Republican candidate for most of 2007, figured. Both of these men were defenders of immigration rights when they were, respectively, governor of Massachusetts and mayor of New York City. As candidates, they morphed into snarling, Dobbs-like alarmists about the danger allegedly posed to the nation by millions of hardworking, poorly paid busboys and maids who were discussed as if they were the moral equivalent of Al Qaida.
But carrying on about immigration was not enough to save Giuliani’s candidacy. Nor did it do much for Fred Thompson, who also figured to benefit from McCain’s collapse.
McCain eventually acknowledged that Congress and the people had rejected his reform bill, and there seemed no point in beating a dead horse. He embraced a stance of more border security, which had always been part of his scheme. But there was no doubt that the charge of “amnesty” hung over him.
And yet here we are in February with McCain the all-but-crowned king of the Republican Party.
What happened?
First, although the anti-immigrant backlash had strength, it was never as big as its promulgators pretended it was, even among voters in Republican primaries.
Hispanic voters — not all of whom are Democrats, and many of whom share the Republican frame of reference about national security and social values — also realized that the anti-alien stance was a thinly disguised attempt to intimidate Latinos. In a state such as Florida, where Cuban Americans helped supply the margin that made McCain a winner, that factor was devastating for Romney.
More to the point, no matter how popular it might have become, immigration bashing could never compete with other more traditional issues. For some on the Right, Mike Huckabee’s stance as the “Christian candidate” on abortion trumped Romney’s anti-amnesty rants. Indeed, even after national conservative talk show hosts spent a week pumping up Romney, Huckabee and McCain split the southern states with Romney coming up last virtually everywhere in Dixie.
As for making illegals a national security issue, common sense won out. Running as the man who championed the troop surge in Iraq when most Republicans were running for cover, McCain was able to explain why the fight with Islamism is the No. 1 issue facing the nation — and not Central Americans who want to fill low-income jobs in this country.
Like any successful candidate, McCain had his share of luck. Most of it centered on the tactical mistakes made by his opponents. One also cannot underestimate the justified reluctance of all his rivals but Romney to personally take on a man who spent five-plus years in the Hanoi Hilton.
Yet if revulsion against illegal immigration was as widespread as some believe, McCain’s impressive wins would have been impossible.
The debate is far from over. Know-nothingism will, no doubt, be back with a vengeance next January, when a new Congress will try again on the issue.
But immigration won’t dictate the outcome of the 2008 general election. There will be more than enough real foreign, security, and economic issues to debate without a drumbeat of manufactured hysteria about immigrants in low-paying jobs that most Americans wouldn’t do under any circumstances.
For Dobbs, this means democracy is failing. For the majority of Americans, descendants of immigrants every one, it sounds like, at least on this point, sanity will prevail for awhile.
Jonathan S. Tobin is executive editor of the Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia.
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