By Jennifer J. Foster
Check out Joe McAdory’s entry over on his blog about our golf showdown on Saturday.
You’ll know you have the right one when you see the title: “Hey Jenn, you can hit from the girlie tees.“
Click on “Comments” to see my response.
Joe’s trying to raise a gallery for the spectacle. So if you’re in the area and you don’t have anything else to do on Saturday morning, well ...
By Jennifer J. Foster
The New York Times’ political blog reports this quote from John McCain at a town hall meeting yesterday:
“I want to look you in the eye: I will not raise your taxes nor support a tax increase ... I will not do it.’’
I know he meant that to be reassuring, but ... yikes. It reminds me of another direct pledge from a Republican presidential candidate ... and it didn’t end well for that guy.
By Jennifer J. Foster
So, let’s say you’re John McCain. You’re a decorated war hero, a former POW, a U.S. senator with a record—albeit a sometimes-contentious one—on some of the most pressing issues of our time. You’ve managed to win the Republican nomination for president while remaining relatively attractive to independents and swing voters. Your opponent is the most liberal senator, in terms of voting records, in the U.S. Senate. He has trouble mobilizing middle-aged white guys—the “typical white person,“ one might say—in Ohio and Pennsylvania and Michigan.
Should be a cake walk in November, right?
Except that Barack Obama is that opponent.
Obama has dominated the cycle—not only for positive news, like that he’s the first African-American candidate to clinch a presidential nomination and he has what has functioned to this point as an all-consuming charisma—but also because he has a racially and religiously diverse background, which has led to more than a few questions—some of them voiced, most of them whispered—about how that background would really shape an Obama presidency.
Even the news about Obama is news in itself—like the massive media entourage that dutifully followed him to the Middle East and Europe, breathlessly covering his every move, swooning at the sight of more than 200,000 gathered to hear him speak in Berlin.
So if you’re McCain, what do you do? Complaints about the coverage, even if they’re well-founded, sound like sour grapes—and you’re still putting the focus on your opponent and allowing him to dictate your response.
Obama’s foreign trip was a whole lot of lemons for the McCain campaign. But it did provide a lot of raw material—a lot of pictures and video. So the McCain campaign decided to make some lemonade.
Enter ‘Celeb,‘ the newest ad from the McCain campaign. (See it here.) The idea behind the ad is one of the best political strategies out there: Find a way to use your opponent’s strength against him. In this case, McCain concedes Obama’s strength—the rock-star quality and the excitement his campaign is creating in the U.S. and around the world. But McCain draws a distinction between celebrity and the ability and preparedness to govern.
In other words, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears are hugely popular in the U.S. and around the world. But no one would argue that either celebrity is equipped to be president (at least, we hope no one would).
Surprisingly, the Obama camp fell into the trap, sniffing about McCain: “Oops, he did it again.” Candidates, if you’re going to be funny, be funny; if you’re going to be serious, don’t try to be just a little bit funny. Obama’s folks should have just brushed off the ad by saying something short and to the point, like, “We’re glad Sen. McCain is contributing to our earned media,” or something like that.
John Weaver, a former McCain adviser and confidant, called the ad “childish.
“For McCain to win in such troubled times, he needs to begin telling the American people how he intends to lead us. That McCain exists. He can inspire the country to greatness.
“There is legitimate mockery of a political campaign now, and it isn’t at Obama’s. For McCain’s sake, this tomfoolery needs to stop.”
Oh, calm down, Mr. Weaver. Watch out, or you might pass out from lack of oxygen up there, what with your nose all the way up in the stratosphere and all.
SIDEBAR: No wonder he’s a former adviser. END SIDEBAR
As for the ad itself, I didn’t think it was childish. It was a well-conceived idea, and it was basically funny. McCain’s folks could have made it better, though, by taking the idea further. I think they could have made their point about preparedness and suitability by keeping the ad light and comical – more like the first two paragraphs of Rick Davis’s follow-up press release – instead of turning it serious halfway through. Why not list the top 10 celebrities and include Obama, show stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and superimpose Obama’s name on one of them, show cheering crowds at concerts and compare those to the Berlin gathering? They could even stack up the celebrity magazines that have featured Obama on the cover – and they wouldn’t even have to make them up! The soundtrack could be Brad Paisley’s “Celebrity:”
‘Cause when you’re a celebrity
It’s adios reality
You can act just like a fool
People think you’re cool
Just ‘cause you’re on TV
I can throw a major fit
When my latte isn’t just how I like it
When they say I’ve gone insane
I’ll blame it on the fame
And the pressures that go with
Being a celebrity
Taking this tack, the point about suitability would make itself.
Of course, the McCain camp also missed the mark by placing this on television. This is a made-to-order Internet ad, primed to go viral – if it had just taken itself a little less seriously.
Unfortunately, that is typical of the McCain campaign: Poor execution dooming otherwise basically good ideas.
And that has nothing to do with Obama.
See also:
Carrie Budoff Brown from Politico reports on how the McCain campaign’s “narrative of Obama as a president-in-waiting … began reverberating beyond the inboxes of Washington operatives and journalists” over the last week. In probably the funniest line I’ve heard about Obama’s confidence, Brown notes that “Jon Stewart teased that the presumptive Democratic nominee traveled to Israel to visit his birthplace at Bethlehem’s Manger Square.”
Now that’s funny.
By Jennifer J. Foster
Got a heads up from from regular reader Don that Alabama Secretary of State Beth Chapman will appear tonight on Special Report with Brit Hume on Fox News Channel. She is expected to discuss Alabama’s efforts to combat voter fraud, which we have covered here before.
Special Report airs at 6 p.m. Eastern, 5 p.m. Central.
By Jennifer J. Foster
A couple of months after the massive immigration demonstrations in the spring of 2006, I was talking to someone about America’s illegal immigration problem.
We were discussing the solutions that had been bantered about by cable’s talking heads. Sure, there were exceptions, but you know the caricatures: Republicans wanted a border fence and massive deportation; Democrats wanted “amnesty” for those who have entered this country illegally.
I said that, as is typical of the two major political parties these days, neither side had a workable plan. It’s pretty expensive to coordinate the location, detention and deportation of 12 MILLION ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS. Where’s that money going to come from? Certainly not the same tax-is-a-four-letter-word Republicans who scream about protecting the border. The possibility exists only in theory that GOP lawmakers would agree to the kind of new taxes that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement personnel would need to convert standard GOP stump speeches into public policy.
As for Democrats, they seemed to want to turn a blind eye to the law enforcement component of this problem, forgetting that America’s national sovereignty and the credibility of her laws were on the line. Many Democrats in state and local offices throughout the country—especially in big cities—actually forbid local law enforcement from detaining someone they discover is in the United States illegally. Not only is this a slap in the face to the millions of immigrants who have gone through proper channels and waited their turn to pursue the American dream, but it makes a mockery of Congress itself: If its own members don’t support the enforcement of the laws they themselves approve, then what is the point of passing those laws?
And neither side seemed to grasp one of the main underlying causes of the immigration problem: The legal visa process.
When I worked in state government in Florida, we would occasionally get calls from folks who needed help with their visa applications. Of course, since these are federal issues, we would refer them to the congressman’s office. But they would call us back, desperate for help with the Embassy: After 9/11, some folks were told that it could be anywhere from two to NINE YEARS before their visas were approved—and that was if laws didn’t change to amend eligibility provisions or contract the number of visas available per year. This was the case even in situations involving families who were separated – some for periods of two years or more.
I make that point to say this: The argument that people should use legal channels would be a lot more credible if those legal channels were in any way reasonable.
They aren’t.
Do you remember hearing any congressman or senator, bellowing away at the well about reforming the visa process? I don’t. (Maybe that’s because pictures of visas don’t make as strong an impression on voters as pictures of a mangled chain link fence at the U.S.-Mexico border on a high-gloss mailer ... but, I digress.)
But laws are laws, and as flawed as they are, it doesn’t excuse people from following them, even in the course of trying to change them. So we’re back to the problem—unchecked illegal immigration, and no real strategy to address it.
Over the course of several conversations with folks over a period of several months, I cobbled together my own idea of immigration reform. It deals both with the cause – an inadequate visa system that is overrun with applicants, understaffed with people to review them and ill-equipped to meet the demands for different types of visas – as well as the effect – people charging en masse over the border, taking their chances while taking advantage of underfunded, understaffed and outgunned border security patrols.
I thought of a medical parallel: Doctors treating a patient who had suffered internal injuries in a car crash, for example, would need to stabilize the patient and stop the external bleeding before repairing internal damage.
So, first, we would need to stabilize the border and stop the influx of new illegal immigrants entering the country. I heard a lot of ideas about how to do this – surveillance drones, beefed-up border patrols, fencing, some combination of all three, etc. All that sounds fine to me. I’m not one of these fence-the-whole-border people. There are places where a fence is the best option, but it’s not the best option – or even necessary – in many places along the borders (yes, we have two). Doggedly insisting on a fence is wasteful, and it takes resources away from potential use elsewhere.
Next, deal with the visa issue. The State Department would need to provide Congress with a complete accounting of pending visa applications, along with trend data for the last 20 years. The system would be overhauled and simplified; no more than a handful of visa types should be necessary, and their availability would be tweaked to reflect the needs of the country. Preference would be given to those who expressed an interest in long-term assimilation and naturalization. With few exceptions, short-term visas would be limited to educational and family purposes.
So once the border is sewn up and sovereignty restored, we can start repairing the internal injuries – dealing with the immigrants who are already here. I couldn’t conceive of a situation where it would be reasonable, or even desirable, to create a massive, Gestapo-type strike force of ICE specialists to track down illegal immigrants in their beds at night, toss them in paddywagons and hustle them to the nearest airport. Yet, that’s just what many of our friends on the right are advocating.
Even if we could fund it (which we can’t), it wouldn’t be the best way to go.
Although some estimates of illegal immigrants in this country put the number above 20 million, the general consensus seems to be around 12 million, so I’ll use that number.
Twelve million people. Roughly the number of people in the swing states of Ohio and Pennsylvania. The government could never track them all down.
So it seemed to me that a two-pronged approach is necessary. We have to get our affairs in order, but we can’t round them all up; we need the stick – and the carrot.
Here’s the idea: Give illegal immigrants a period of anywhere from 90 days to six months to turn themselves in, register with the government and be deported to the country from which they entered the United States.
That’s right: Turn themselves in and be deported.
Why would they do that? you ask. They’ve already come in illegally. Why would they seek out the government to give themselves up?
Because there’s a carrot involved.
Under the plan, illegal immigrants who turned themselves in during the allotted period would be eligible to return to the U.S. immediately upon payment of a $1000 fine.
The fine and deportation are their punishment for having broken the laws of the United States, but their incentive to turn themselves in is that they would be able to return, relatively quickly, and be fully invested in America as legitimate immigrants. They would be encouraged to enroll in citizenship classes, and they would re-enter the country with a Social Security Number; they would be paying taxes, and we would have a better idea of who’s here.
Of course, not everyone likes their veggies, and the carrot won’t work for everyone. Illegal immigrants who didn’t turn themselves in during the grace period (I will not call it amnesty, because it isn’t) would be placed on a list that would be distributed to all state and local government law enforcement and social service agencies. Congress would pass legislation that made federal funding for states and municipalities contingent on cooperation with federal authorities on immigration issues (just like they made road funding contingent on increasing the drinking age to 21). Any state or local law enforcement or social service agency that came across someone on the list would be required to report that information to ICE. Or else.
In this way, ICE would begin to locate, detain, register and deport illegal immigrants as they found them. Deported immigrants would face a one-year ban on applying for legal entry into the United States. If they were caught in the country during their probationary period, they would be immediately deported and banned from the country for five years. If they were caught in the country during that probationary period, they would be banned for life.
Advocates for illegal immigrants are always telling us how the vast majority of them are law-abiding, hard-working people who just want to make a better life for themselves and their families, and they only came in illegally because of our flawed visa system. I’d like to believe them. This plan would give them a chance to prove it. They could help the country deal with its illegal immigration crisis, and they would be able to step out of the shadows, as advocates like to say, and into legitimacy in their new country.
It might be that even half of illegal immigrants would take advantage of the grace period and the chance to legitimize themselves. But even if it was only 30 percent, that’s 3.6 million immigrants ICE wouldn’t have to track down. We would make a big dent in the numbers. And then we would have a truer picture of the extent of the remaining problem – and the resources we would need to solve it, once and for all.
So that’s my idea. I’ve talked about it on a couple of occasions with various people when we’ve gotten into discussions about how immigration might turn up again in policy.
Well, I saw this article tonight on CNN.com:
U.S. immigration officials, taking a new tack to solve an old, intractable problem, say they will give “fugitive aliens” in certain cities incentives to surrender during a three-week period in August.
The program will give fugitive aliens—people who have been ordered by immigration courts to leave the United States—up to 90 days after surrendering to get their affairs in order before departing the country.
For those without sufficient financial means, the program also will make arrangements for them to leave the United States. And the program will allow fugitive aliens to avoid detention pending their removal, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said Wednesday.
Hmmm … interesting!
This program doesn’t target all illegal immigrants, and it’s only available in five cities over the three-week period. So it’s probably not going to be useful for comparison’s sake. But I’ll really be interested in the numbers this program is able to generate. If it’s at all successful among people who have already been formally ordered to leave the country, then I’ll like its changes among illegal immigrants as a whole.
And if you’ve read all the way to the end of this super-long post, you get an ‘A’ in Policy Wonkishness 101.
Ah, kindred spirits! We would have busted the curve together in government class.
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