Bush / GOP

The Times editorial page continues their strong advocacy for a more sensible American immigration policy with an editorial today calling on our nation's leaders to fix one piece of the broken immigration system - the astonishing backlog of citizenship applications of legal immigrants. They write:

About the only point of agreement on immigration in this country is that newcomers who play by the rules — fill out their forms, pay their fees and wait their turn — are welcome. But that great American dogma is being sorely tested by the inability of the federal government’s feeble citizenship agency to deal with a flood of applications that arose this summer.

The agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, is telling legal immigrants that applications for citizenship and for residence visas filed after June 1 will take about 16 to 18 months to process. The agency was utterly unprepared for the surge, and so tens of thousands of Americans-in-waiting will have to keep on waiting. Many, gallingly, may have to sit out next November’s election, even though that civic act was what prompted many of them to apply in the first place...

After the collapse of the Senate immigration bill earlier this year, there has been pressure on Congress to do something about our broken and unacceptable immigration system. A good place to start would be for Congress to add additional one time funds to the Department of Homeland Security to clear this backlog when it returns next week.

It will be interesting to see how the GOP Presidential field handles this question at their Univision Debate on December 9th. For more on this issue check out the Washington Post's detailed account.

Over at Daily Kos Markos weighs in on the immigration reform fight.  He concludes:

The solution is easy enough -- comprehensive immigration reform with stronger workplace and border enforcement, but with a clear path to citizenship for the nation's millions of undocumented, hard-working immigrants. Bush and Rove wanted exactly this, and had they been successful, the Latino vote would've remained a highly contested swing vote. Instead, Republicans are all but begging them to vote Democratic.

The RNC Chairman resigns. The former House Speaker Dennis Hastert resigns. The former Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott resigns. The number of Senate and House GOP incumbents retiring continues to rise. The Senate Minority Leader is in serious political trouble. By any measure the GOP's Presidential field is one of modern times. Their party's handling of the war in Iraq, the economy, the budget and immigration have left them ideologically in tatters. In the Presidential debate process they have repeatedly stiffed minorities, fighting in a reactionary way the changing demography of our nation.

As NDN's recent national poll shows the national GOP is at 33 percent in both the Presidential and Congressional generic polls, a remarkably low number by any measure. As the NY Times reports today, another sign of the utter collapse of the GOP brand is their inability to raise money. Democrats, using new and old methods, have outraised the GOP this year by hundreds of millions of dollars. In Congress the political and financial collapse is so complete that the GOP is now turning to wealthy self-funders, a potentially perilous political choice at a time when the middle class is desperately looking for champions to help them navigate the rigors of the ever competitive global economy.

The political and ideological collapse of the modern GOP is perhaps the most dramatic story in American politics today. It is a theme we've been discussing for some time at NDN. It is also what makes the current opportunity so great for progressives, an opportunity Peter Leyden and I write about extensively in the current issue of Mother Jones magazine, in a story called The 50-Year Strategy.

What a sorry legacy Bush and Rove are going to leave the nation, their party, and their own ideological movement. And what an opportunity they have given progressives to seize the initiative and lead America with confidence and grace into a challenging new century.

The Politico writes that Scott McClellan, the former Press Secretary to President Bush, "unknowingly passed along false information" about the CIA leak case of Valerie Plame Wilson to the press. Specifically, the President and Vice President (among others) allowed him to mislead the public. From the article:

Former White House press secretary Scott McClellan names names in a caustic passage from a forthcoming memoir that accuses President Bush, Karl Rove and Vice President Cheney of being "involved" in his giving the press false information about the CIA leak case.

McClellan’s publisher released three paragraphs from the book “WHAT HAPPENED: Inside the Bush White House and What’s Wrong With Washington.”

The excerpts give no details about the alleged involvement of the president or vice president.

But McClellan lists five top officials as having allowed him inadvertently to mislead the public.

“I stood at the White house briefing room podium in front of the glare of the klieg lights for the better part of two weeks and publicly exonerated two of the seniormost aides in the White House: Karl Rove and Scooter Libby,” McClellan wrote.

“There was one problem. It was not true.”

McClellan then absolves himself and makes an inflammatory — and potentially lucrative for his publisher — charge.

“I had unknowingly passed along false information,” McClellan wrote.

“And five of the highest ranking officials in the administration were involved in my doing so: Rove, Libby, the vice president, the president's chief of staff and the president himself."

Wow.

In his New York Times column yesterday Paul Krugman thoughtfully examines the centrality of a great national electoral strategy, the Southern Strategy, to the recent rise of conservatives. It is a story line he explores in much more depth in his very worthwhile new book, The Conscience of a Liberal.

In our new article in Mother Jones magazine, The 50 Year Strategy, Peter Leyden and I argue that the progressives and Democrats are in the process of constructing the next great electoral strategy, one yet unnamed, that capitalizes on the emerging demography and politics of the early 21st century.

This new strategy builds upon Democratic strongholds in the Northeast and Pacific West, requires Democrats and progressives to win in all the other regions of the country, and builds particularly upon the support of two new groups that will end being very influential in the 21st century - Hispanics and Millennials.

Implicit in all this is how the concept of race is changing in America. For over 300 years, race in America was a white-black, majority-minority, exploitive experience. The very large wave of immigration America is currently experiencing, driven to a great degree by new Asian and Hispanic immigrants, is changing that historic and pernicious equation. In the age of the Southern Strategy minorities - African Americans - were a small fraction of the population. In America today "minorities" are 30 percent of our national population. In my lifetime America will become a majority minority nation. Even the word minority itself will begin to change its meaning as American becomes a very different place with a very different people in the 21st century.

To get a sense of all this look at the Presidential fields. Taken together the GOP Presidential candidates look that 20th century Southern Strategy Party. The Democratic field, featuring a woman, an Hispanic, a mixed race candidate of African descent and a white populist from the New South, looks much more like the Party of this next more racially and geographically complicated post-Southern Strategy nation.

For more on the changing nature of America's Hispanic population, check out our new report Hispanics Rising. And for more on Millennials visit our affiliate, the New Politics Institute.

For the second consecutive November election, the national GOP invested a great deal of money, candidate time and hope in using the issue of immigration to hurt Democrats. For the second consecutive election it did not deliver for the GOP (see this report from the National Immigration Forum for how the issue played in 2006).

Two headlines this morning tell the story:

"New York Democrats Say License Issue Had Little Effect" – New York Times

"In the Ballot Booths, No Fixation on Immigration" – Washington Post

The election results told us that while the American people are unhappy with our broken immigration system, they are looking for leaders willing to step up and solve the problem, rather than simply offering empty rhetoric and scapegoating. In each election, the GOP's strategy has been to inflame people's concerns about immigration, scapegoat immigrants themselves, while failing to offer a plan to fix it. In each election, Democrats advocated pragmatic solutions to a tough national problem and were rewarded on election day.

Looking ahead to next year, all of the Democratic candidates for President are united around a plan, called Comprehensive Immigration Reform, for fixing the broken immigration system. Comprehensive Immigration Reform has been one of the most bi-partisan legislative initiatives of recent years, as it has been enthusiastically supported by the Catholic Church, the Chamber of Commerce, many labor unions and immigrant rights groups, and political leaders as diverse as John McCain, George Bush, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. In its original form it passed the Republican controlled Senate in 2006, and in 2007 even virulent anti-immigration Senators like John Kyl accepted the need to create a path to citizenship for the undocumented immigrants already here.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform takes a three-part strategy to fixing our broken immigration system. It would 1) toughen up on the border and in the workplace 2) deal with the future flow of immigrants more intelligently to reduce future illegal immigrants from coming into the country 3) legalize the work status and create an earned path to citizenship for those 11-12 million already here, working, paying taxes and raising their families.

This common sense, tough and smart plan to fix our immigration system is supported by the American people. As a new memo from the National Immigration Forum shows there is majority support for the framework of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, including granting the undocumenteds a path to citizenship. Most national polls taken in 2007 showed 60 % plus support for allowing undocumenteds to stay in the country.

What the elections in recent weeks have taught there are smart solutions to the fixing the immigration system that draw broad public support – such as the legislation known as Comprehensive Immigration Reform – and there are approaches that work less well. Of course this makes immigration reform just like any other issue facing American political leaders today.

While the Democratic candidates for President have stood hard and fast on the side of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, the Republican candidates for President - save John McCain - oppose this legislation and have failed to offer any kind of realistic reform plan. Given the early polling, we should expect a very significant debate next year on immigration, with one Party largely unified in their support of a plan to fix the immigration system, and one Party largely unified in their defense of an untenable status quo.

The Republican handling of the immigration issue has been a disaster for their Party. They have invested tens of millions of dollars in an issue that has not performed, and has worked to reinforce their image as a Party more concerned with politics than solving problems. It cost them their national Chairman, Mel Martinez, who resigned over how his Party was handling the issue. And it is has alienated, perhaps permanently, the fastest growing part of the American electorate, Hispanics. The national GOP has seen these kinds of politics play out before in California in the 1990s. Their demonization and scapegoating of immigrants turned California, the home of Nixon and Reagan, into one of the most Democratic and progressive states in the nation.

As NDN outlines in a new article in Mother Jones magazine and in a recent major report on the Hispanic electorate, the strategic missteps of the Republicans on the immigration issue may very well be the key to a new and durable 21st century majority for Democrats. Michael Gerson, former speechwriter to George W. Bush, makes a similar argument in a recent Washington Post column:

I have never seen an issue [immigration] where the short-term interests of Republican presidential candidates in the primaries were more starkly at odds with the long-term interests of the party itself. At least five swing states that Bush carried in 2004 are rich in Hispanic voters -- Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Florida. Bush won Nevada by just over 20,000 votes. A substantial shift of Hispanic voters toward the Democrats in these states could make the national political map unwinnable for Republicans … Some in the party seem pleased. They should be terrified.

NDN's hope is that in the years ahead the Republican Party will come to realize that their immigration strategy has been a strategic disaster, and decide to sit down and work with the Democrats to build a 21st century American immigration system that meets the need of our modern economy and does so in a way that is consistent with our values.

At the Huffington Post Tom Edsall visits one of our favorite stories, which includes this line:

Nothing however, better exemplifies the compulsive irrationality that has taken over the Republican Party than its handling of the Hispanic electorate.

As our recent report, Hispanics Rising, details, we agree with Mr. Edsall.  Of course we wish it were otherwise, and that the GOP had worked with Democrats to pass a good and thoughtful immigration bill.   

In the last few weeks the media has reported on how DHS and the Pentagon cannot account for billions of dollars; of growing corruption scandals in DOD contracting; of the weakening of the Consumer Product Safety Commission at a moment when globalization has made keeping the American people safe a more complex job; and today the Times reports on more Bush era malfeasance, this time at Interior:

WASHINGTON, Sept. 25 — The Interior Department’s program to collect billions of dollars annually from oil and gas companies that drill on federal lands is troubled by mismanagement, ethical lapses and fears of retaliation against whistle-blowers, the department’s chief independent investigator has concluded.

The report, a result of a yearlong investigation, grew out of complaints by four auditors at the agency, who said that senior administration officials had blocked them from recovering money from oil companies that underpaid the government.

It is simply astonishing how hard it has been for the conservatives of the Bush era to act in the public interest, rather than their own interest or the interest of the rich and powerful.  The corruption has been systemic, across all branches of government, and not at all a "few bad apples."  It has been the way they have governed. 

I still think Congressional leaders need to confront the Bush Administration and the conservatives head on.  They should demand that Bush appoint an ethics czar responsible for ferretting out corruption and raising the ethical and legal performance of the government.  Inspector Generals need to be encouraged to do their work and report to Congress.  Additional staff need to be added to the Office of Public Integrity at Justice to pursue those who have betrayed the public trust. 

The President himself needs to be confronted by responsible members of Congress for all that has gone wrong in this era.  The odd hearing here and there, the demand for internal papers isn't really sufficient any more.  Something fundamental broke down in this era, and Congress has a responsibility to prevent it from ever happening again.

The latest issue of The Economist features a flattering profile of Governor Bill Richardson, whose many successes (and few failures) in areas like diplomacy make up what has turned out to be an incredibly impressive resumé. Yet still, he remains among the second-tier of his fellow Democratic candidates. To vault himself to the top, the article suggests one community Richardson could naturally turn to for support: Hispanics. From the Economist:

Mr Richardson's Latino heritage will probably help him. Hispanics make up about 15% of the population. Many are not yet citizens and so cannot vote, but the Hispanic electorate will have nearly doubled between 2000 and 2008, from 7.5m to 14m, by one estimate. Hispanics are both the largest and the fastest-growing minority, and their votes are up for grabs. Whereas African-Americans vote monolithically for the same party (the Democrats), Latinos switch back and forth a bit.

The article then goes in-depth, suggesting that candidates from both parties consider reaching out to the fastest-growing minority and not alienate or demonize it:

George Bush wooed them assiduously and won 40% of the Latino vote in 2004—twice the share his fellow Republican Bob Dole had managed eight years previously. But then nativist Republicans derailed Mr Bush's plan for a more welcoming immigration system. Some of them, such as Congressman Tom Tancredo of Colorado, used alarmist rhetoric that sounded hostile to Hispanics in general. Hispanics duly dumped the Republicans—the Democrats' 19 percentage point lead in 2004 swelled to 39 points in 2006.

Democratic strategists confidently predict that they will maintain their lead among Latinos in 2008. Immigration reform is still stalled, and the top Republican presidential candidates, with the conspicuous exception of John McCain, are pandering to nativist voters. The line-up at Republican presidential debates was all-white until a few days ago, and includes both Mr Tancredo and Duncan Hunter, who boasts he will build not one but two fences along the Mexican border. Neither has a chance of winning, but the contrast with the Democrats is nonetheless stark. Two of their candidates speak fluent Spanish (the other is Christopher Dodd). All attended a debate on Univision, a Spanish-language channel, on September 9th; the Republicans have yet to follow suit.

It is pointless to make long-term predictions about how a group as diverse as Latinos will vote—it depends how each party treats them. But one can wager that Republican raging about illegal immigration will boost the Democrats next year. If they take Florida, a big swing state where 11% of those who voted in 2006 were Latino, it will be hard for a Republican to win the White House. That is also true if they capture Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado, which are all heavily Hispanic.

The growing political influence and power of the Hispanic electorate is something that we at NDN have discussed for quite some time. For more details, check out our most recent report, Hispanics Rising.

For 5 years the NDN community has been telling a simple but important story - that the very rapid growth of the Hispanic community was creating a very new and powerful dynamic in the American electorate.

In our new report, Hispanics Rising, NDN reviews the emerging politics of the fastest-growing part of the American electorate, one deeply changed by the immigration debate. The report documents how Hispanics have gone from a group trending Republican to a group overwhelmingly Democratic; one whose percentage of the American electorate has increased by 33 percent in the last 4 years; and one poised, because of the structure of the Electoral College, to determine who the next President will be in 2008.

Writing in the Washington Post yesterday, former Bush Chief White House Speechwriter Michael Gerson described the changes in the Hispanic electorate this way:

I have never seen an issue where the short-term interests of Republican presidential candidates in the primaries were more starkly at odds with the long-term interests of the party itself. At least five swing states that Bush carried in 2004 are rich in Hispanic voters -- Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Florida. Bush won Nevada by just over 20,000 votes. A substantial shift of Hispanic voters toward the Democrats in these states could make the national political map unwinnable for Republicans … Some in the party seem pleased. They should be terrified.

See additional stories about these developments here and here.

As always, your thoughts and comments are welcome.