He looks like comedian Jon Lovitz, loves ESPN’s “SportsCenter” and “Columbo” reruns and is considering a diet after posing in a Detroit Red Wings jersey during the recent Stanley Cup playoffs.
“Somebody said I looked exactly like a goalie,” Sen. Spencer Abraham said Friday, looking slightly dyspeptic. “Which meant I looked fat. So I better cut down on the food.”
Well, if one isn’t surprised that somebody from blue-collar, sports-loving Michigan is likened to an athlete, one might be that a Republican is a leader on one of the more politically sensitive issues: immigration.
Not all that long after the GOP led a vigorous attack on illegal and legal immigration, Abraham has smoothed the edges on, even redirected, his party’s positions on the matter.
It is typified by Senate passage of a bill to increase an immigration program, known as H-1B, that brings a maximum of 65,000 supposedly high-skilled professionals here on temporary visas. Due to high-tech demands, this year’s limit was reached last month, and Abraham persuaded colleagues to hike it to 95,000 for 1998 and to 85,000 for the four subsequent years.
For sure, there are problems with the program. The Labor Department, which oversees it, concedes it doesn’t know what jobs everybody has filled and at what salaries. All it has are the individual applications. That’s an absurdity.
These visas are good for as long as six years. Based on the applications, it is believed that computer programmers and physical therapists make up a large chunk of the recipients, with many coming from India and China and earning in the $25,000 to $50,000 salary range.
Often, they are recruited by temporary worker agencies that lease them to corporations, whose labor costs then are kept down.
It helps explain why some critics, such as Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), the big cheese in the House on immigration, call for regulations, such as proof those companies couldn’t have hired American workers or didn’t lay off some to make room for cheaper and temporary foreigners. Abraham finds both ideas impractical.
“These are `techno braceros,’ ” said Dan Stein, an Abraham critic with an often anti-immigration group, the Federation for American Immigration Reform. “They’re just like agricultural workers, brought in and subcontracted out.”
The program’s possible inadequacies aside, Abraham represents a far more benevolent take on immigration within his party these days. It is of consequence that Abraham, 46, a much-liked Harvard Law School graduate who worked for Vice President Dan Quayle, now is chairman of the same immigration committee that had been overseen by former Sen. Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.), who had many doubts about immigration.
Abraham is the grandson of Lebanese immigrants. His mom’s father was a peddler near LaSalle, Ill., who moved to Toledo, Ohio, and opened a grocery. His father’s dad worked the mines of West Virginia, then wound up in Lansing, Mich., where he had a grocery and then was an auto worker.
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“My family talked a lot about their ancestral experiences,” he said. “They spoke English but paid attention to their heritage. Those experiences were what my family passed on to me.”
Legislatively, Abraham succeeded in severing the legal and illegal immigration provisions from a Simpson-authored bill in late 1995. It meant a less restrictive policy.
He has accentuated the positive of immigration, organizing hearings on Ellis Island to underscore its contributions and noting how one in five Medal of Honor winners have been immigrants. He has helped win passage of related bills, including one liberalizing the numbers allowed into this country from Central America, often staggering from the effects of past civil wars.
Abraham knows the views that foreigners are cynically used to replace Americans. It explains why he added job-training and scholarship provisions for American workers in his bill to boost the H-1B program, which passed the Senate last month and awaits a possibly different version coming from the House.
“There is a lack of skilled workers. We have an obligation to solve it with Americans while creating high-skilled technology jobs,” he said.
Abraham had never run for elective office before gaining his Senate seat, and he did so only after running for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee and losing. To the losers went the spoils, since Mississippi’s Haley Barbour won and Abraham and John Ashcroft of Missouri both lost but went on to better gigs as senators.
It also may be somewhat notable that, in the early jockeying for the GOP presidential nomination in 2000, nobody is making a big deal, as Pat Buchanan did in 1996, about immigration.
Maybe we’ll see a softer, gentler GOP, as exemplified by Abraham: the fan of the Red Wings, the ice hockey champions with, come to think of it, several highly skilled Russians.
Drudge watch
Matt Drudge is an odd fellow who writes an Internet gossip and media column called the Drudge Report and wears wide-brimmed hats a la the late gossip legend Walter Winchell.
Most mainstream media don’t trust him. But he has had just enough modest scoops that people pay a certain heed even while disparaging him. He has gained a legitimacy comically disproportionate to his labors in TV appearances, including an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and is soon to have his own TV gabfest on the Fox News Channel.
His hat must be feeling awfully snug these days since the attention apparently has expanded his ego.
That may explain a “Drudge-Report-Flash” disseminated last week and titled, “CNN’s Larry King Bumped Me for Toobin, Carville!” In a world in which people promote personal successes, this heralded failure.
Drudge had been scheduled to appear on CNN’s “Larry King Live” with Steven Brill, founder of a new media magazine whose premiere issue caused a stir with a piece on press coverage of the Monica Lewinsky mess.
He came to Washington, he says, and was “nudged out” for Clinton chum James Carville, legal reporter Jeffrey Toobin and CNN’s own Wolf Blitzer.
King’s spokesperson declines to say a thing on this truly sensitive topic.
But if normal Washington reporters put out press releases every time they were disinvited to talk shows (“We’ve decided to go a slightly different direction but thanks so much, anyway . . .,” says a 20-something booker), fax machines would be jammed nightly.
Cokie watch
Maybe it’s infectious when toiling near a queen of the moonlighters, but George Stephanopoulos, the former President Clinton aide who is a regular (and good) pundit on “This Week With Sam and You Know Who,” is supplementing his ABC gig and reported seven-figure book contract with paid speaking.
He has been in Chicago at least three times in the last month, including twice at Jewish United Fund functions.
The Jewish United Fund won’t say how much. Would their star attraction?
“You’re very direct, and I will be,” Stephanopoulos said Friday. “I won’t disclose my fees. I do give a significant portion to charity, but I won’t disclose that either.”
He called later to add “one final note. Of course I am not a full-time ABC employee. I have a consulting contract . . . I am a political analyst, clearly not on their terms covered by their full-time contracts. Take care.”