The President’s Pivot
By CHARLES M. BLOW
“Thus it is that in war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory.”
That quote, from Sun Tzu’s ancient Chinese treatise “The Art of War,”
perfectly captures President Obama’s strategic victory over Tea Party
members of Congress on the government shutdown and the debt ceiling
debate. It also explains his immediate pivot to another topic that Tea
Partyers hate and over which their obstinacy is likely to get the party
hammered again: comprehensive immigration reform.
This is a brilliant tactical move on the president’s part. And Republicans know it.
As the G.O.P. was nearing its moment of collapse on the shutdown and
debt ceiling, Representative Raúl Labrador, Republican of Idaho, said,
“I think it’d be crazy for the House Republican leadership to enter into
negotiations with him on immigration.” He continued: “And I’m a
proponent of immigration reform. So I think what he’s done over the last
two and a half weeks — he’s trying to destroy the Republican Party. And
I think that anything we do right now with this president on
immigration will be with that same goal in mind: which is to try to
destroy the Republican Party and not to get good policies.”
The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer laid out the president’s
calculus more bluntly on Fox News: “With immigration, he wins either
way. I’m not sure he thinks he can get it passed, seeing the resistance
among the Republicans to the deal over the budget. I think he knows he’s
not going to have a good chance of getting immigration through, but he
thinks — and he’s probably right — that he can exploit this for the
midterm election as a way to gin up support, for the Democrats to
portray the Republicans as anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, etc.”
Republicans have a tough choice.
They can ride shotgun once again with the politically suicidal Tea Party
faction, a group that the Pew Research Center for the People and the
Press found
this week to be “less popular than ever.” They can allow the most
strident voices on the far right that oppose comprehensive immigration
reform — Rush Limbaugh has likened it
to the Republican Party’s “authoring its demise” — to direct their path
and further alienate Hispanic voters, who are increasingly coming to
see the party as an unwelcoming place. Mitt Romney lost the Hispanic
vote by 44 points last year, and the Republican National Committee’s own
autopsy on that loss surmised:
“If Hispanic Americans perceive that a G.O.P. nominee or candidate does
not want them in the United States (i.e., self-deportation), they will
not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say
about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want
them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”
Or Republicans can take the less likely path and demonstrate that
they’ve been cowed enough to move ahead on a major piece of legislation
that is supported by the majority of the American people — a July Gallup poll found
that 71 percent of Americans believe that passing immigration reform is
important. And that would be good not just for the president’s legacy
but for the health of the country as a whole.
In a 2012 paper
published by the Cato Institute, Raúl Hinojosa Ojeda, director of the
North American Integration and Development Center at the University of
California, Los Angeles, used computing models to estimate the
following:
“Comprehensive immigration reform generates an annual increase in U.S.
G.D.P. of at least 0.84 percent. This amounts to $1.5 trillion in
additional G.D.P. over 10 years. It also boosts wages for both
native-born and newly legalized immigrant workers.”
Comprehensive immigration reform is the right thing and the thing that
Americans want. But the far right is hardly concerned with what’s right
and has little appetite for agreeing with the will of the majority of
the American people (despite talking ad nauseam about standing up for
the American people).
The far right is angry at the government and the man at the top of it. According to a Pew Research report
released Friday: “Anger at the federal government is most pronounced
among Tea Party Republicans. Fully 55 percent of Republicans and
Republican-leaning independents who agree with the Tea Party say they
are angry with the federal government — about double the percentage
among non-Tea Party Republicans (27 percent) and Democrats and
Democratic leaners (25 percent).”
They have been blinded by that anger. The president knows that. And he
knows that blind soldiers don’t often win battles. In choosing to pivot
to immigration reform, he has created a win-win scenario for himself and
the Democrats. Clever, clever.
No comments:
Post a Comment