Reading this great piece by Victor Hanson got me wondering if maybe indeed the best option for the GOP viz the immigration debate is just to simply put the foot down and insist no deal without first securing the border and writing in stone the rules by which illegals may one day gain citizenship - the Democrats will decline your offer, cast you as racists and you'll lose the Latino vote, possibly for good - but that's probably gonna happen anyway - certainly that's the conclusion to draw from article in the New Yorker about how the Obama administration is secretly running the negotiations from the shadows because they believe no matter what happens here it will amount to electoral magic for them. So accept that reality and go out and aggressively court the non-Latino vote by standing firmly by your principles and painting vividly for the non-Latino voter [and that 25% of the Hispanic market that did vote for you] the disturbing picture Hanson paints - make it clear to people that what the democrats are doing is ruinous for the country, is full of corruption and vile demagoguery and shameless, self serving lies - and if not another Latino ever votes for you then so be it, the country was doomed anyways.
I dunno if that would be going too far - but as I've said before what's it gonna mean if the GOP capitulates and gains little at the polling booth, which to me seems likely? They'll essentially have sold the country down the river for nothing - so take Rubio and send him out there and have him make the case that he made an honest effort to eschew partisanship and do what's right for this country but the Democrats only wanted to demagogue and play politics because all they really care about is winning elections no matter what the cost, make the case that the GOP refuses to put the country at risk simply to pander to the Latino vote and if that means we never win another national election, well so be it. I'm firmly coming to believe that whatever small gain republicans get from Hispanic voters by signing onto a flawed policy essentially written by Obama and therefore full of loopholes concerning border security and paths to citizenship, whatever small gains we squeeze from that compromise will be negated by losing non-Latino voters who are just sick and tired of what's happening to the country and opt rather to check out and simply stop voting, which is sort of what happened in 2012.
[shouldn't polls of Hispanics regarding securing the border and paths to citizenship reveal what political upside or lack thereof is immanent in the GOP agreeing to an immigration reform that may be more liberal than conservative in nature? So, Romney got 25% of the Hispanic vote and it seems reasonable to assume that 25% is pretty rock solid in its conservatism - so if polls showed 75% of Latinos held views on securing the border and rights to citizenship that hew close to or maybe even exceed liberal dogma on such, that would be pretty god damn revelatory, no? Now, I know I've seen polls out there that go over this ground but I don't quite remember what they indicated, but I think it wasn't good - regardless, those polls should say a lot about the proper way forward - to me I think rather than cutting their own throats by agreeing to what amounts to amnesty without true border security, conservatives should instead focus on how to get elected with only 30% of the Latino vote because I think that's going to be the reality no matter what happens here - and I say 30% rather than 25% because I'm figuring a much more gifted politician than Romney has a reasonable shot of hitting that number. Let's face it, there are at least 11 million illegals in America - if they ever get citizenship it seems pretty reasonable to conclude that they will owe their allegiance to the Democratic party - but even if they don't get citizenship their children will be citizens and their childrens children will be citizens and it's very likely they'll all feel an allegiance to the Democratic party - so conservatives need to stand back, accept that failure to secure the southern border was quite possibly a fatal, a terminal mistake, and then make an honest appraisal of how, if that mistake is indeed survivable, how you'd go about doing it - getting involved in negotiations with a scheming ideologue like Obama does not seem like the answer 'cause he's probably right in feeling he and the liberal agenda wins this debate over securing the border and citizenship, aka immigration reform, no matter what happens - I don't know what the answer is, other than that the next GOP presidential nominee needs to have much broader appeal and much more skill at selling a message through the media than Romney did]
