What beliefs?

We really need to focus more of our fire on Rudy and Mitt.  McCain is not the front runner, is fading badly, and is starting to look old and bewildered.  As George Wallace said in one of his Alabama campaigns about a weak rival, "My momma taught me to never say anything bad about the dead, even the politically dead."

Rudy, right now, looks like the one Republican who can beat us.  Do you honestly think they apply the same standards to their own?  It's Ok if you are Republican (IOKIYAR)will protect him if he is the clear front runner.  We'll know on August 11 at the Iowa Straw Poll.

Two observations:

1) While McCain has been pandering a whole bunch here, this one has got to be one of the sharpest turns yet. I was there when McCain was honored by LULAC at their legislative gala last year (alongside Kennedy), and his speech was rather fierce and uncompromising. Well he left the door open to compromise legislatively, as did Kennedy, but definitely within the parameters of adhering to the core vision of their legislation, which the Pence proposal definitely does NOT meet. There's already been an effective job done of contrasting McCain's panders on a whole host of issues; just add this one to the list folks!

2) McCain's reviving the "Straight Talk Express" as a campaign ploy isn't exactly a new type of pandering; the whole thing always was. Check out this excerpt from GOP pollster/wordsmith Frank Luntz' book, talking about "Twenty-one words and phrases for the Twenty-First century:"

But John McCain was not the first person to use the phrase "Straight Talk." When I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania back in 1983, I wrote a newspaper column for the Daily Pennsylvanian called "Straight Talk." As an undergraduate, I was already fascinated by words, and I thought "straight talk" was the most explicit way to communicate the notion of matter-of-fact language. A decade later, in several presentations to Senate Republicans just before and just after the 1996 presidential elections, I explicitly advocated that senators pick up on the concept of "straight talk." I was somewhat amused to see Senator McCain start using the phrase a year later. I can't be sure whether he got the idea from me--maybe we're just wired the same way. But whatever its origins, "straight talk" is a political winner.

This is amazing. Truly. Mike Pence's bill is a "fallback"? It is diametrically opposed to almost everything about the Kennedy/McCain approach.

The man has no core beliefs. Even I thought that his immigration stance was one of the few points on which he seemed to have some principles. And to backtrack now ... when he's staked out the other side so publicly ... wow. Craven and stupid.

I am no fan of McCain's, and certainly some of his pandering, such as cozying up to Jerry Falwell, is egregious. However, I'm not too sure this one qualifies. As McCain says, "... we couldn't pass the legislation." And that's really what I see going on here. If you're trying to pass something and you don't have the votes, you can either hold to your principles and lose, or you can "sell out" and make some compromise that will bring some of your opposition over to your side.

Now you can argue, justifiably, that maybe Mike Pence is not the first guy you should try to make a deal with on immigration policy, but if you want to pass something, you're going to have to make a deal somewhere, and most likely that deal is going to make the legislation worse.

Now personally I would prefer that McCain use the platform of his presidential campaign to argue forcefully that immigration reform with a path to citizenship for current illegal aliens is good for America and also the right and humane thing to do. But the politics of such an argument are not good, so this is a) still not likely to work and b) guaranteed to cost McCain votes in Republican primaries, even in Iowa and New Hampshire, which have relatively small immigrant populations.

I would also note that characterizing a waffle on immigration as pandering to "ultra-conservatives" is fairly misleading; while Tancredo and his ilk may be the worst, illegal immigrants are regarded with suspicion and demonized by large swathes of the US population from across the political spectrum. I know I have had conversations with people who are otherwise fairly liberal but seem to have an irrational hatred of immigrants.

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