by Frank James
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It says something about the state of the White House’s political antenna at this point in President Bush’s second term that he was surprised by the fierce negative reaction within Republican Party’s conservative circles to the way he criticized their opposition to the immigration compromise bill now before the Senate.
According to a Washington Times report today:
President Bush did not intend to single out his conservative supporters for criticism in a speech on immigration reform last week and was “surprised” that his remarks angered Republicans, White House spokesman Tony Snow said yesterday.
“He was surprised by the reaction,” Mr. Snow said of Mr. Bush’s speech in Glynco, Ga., last week. “The speech in Georgia was, ‘We’ve got a serious problem, and we need to fix it.’ It was not in any way designed to be pointed at Republicans.”
But conservative opponents of a Senate immigration bill supported by Mr. Bush reacted furiously to the president’s suggestion that they are resorting to scare tactics by using the word “amnesty” in referring to the measure that would allow millions of illegal aliens to remain in the United States.
“Those determined to find fault with this bill will always be able to look at a narrow slice of it and find something they don’t like,” Mr. Bush said in the May 29 speech about the legislation being debated in the Senate. “If you want to kill the bill, if you don’t want to do what’s right for America, you can pick one little aspect out of it, you can use it to frighten people. Or you can show leadership and solve this problem once and for all.”
Some Republicans on Capitol Hill said that Mr. Bush seemed to be questioning their patriotism, and several conservative activists said the president was splitting the Republican Party by insulting those who have been his most loyal supporters…
It’s hard to fathom how Bush, typically savvy when it comes to the political care and feeding of his political base, would think those words wouldn’t outrage conservatives who oppose the immigration legislation as it’s currently constructed.
Everyone knew whom he was talking about. It wasn’t, obviously, the president’s usual liberal Democratic foils like Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) since Kennedy was an important partne in helping the White House craft the legislation.
It’s easy to see how the president got to this stage where he appeared to accuse his conservative immigration critics of lacking enough patriotism.
What he did to conservatives is similar to what he’s long done to liberal critics of how he has waged the war on terror and the Iraq War.
With Democrats, he often has seemed to equate their criticism of his policies with a lack of enough patriotism or a critical failure to accurately understand the threats facing the nation. Rarely has he acknowledged that his critics on national security might have a point.
It’s an approach that has worked for him since 9/11. So it wasn’t much of a leap for him to work the concept into an immigration speech in which he took on the bill’s conservative critics.
But while the president can obviously score points with conservatives when he appears to question the Democrats’ patriotism or smartness on national security, he obviously only loses points with them when he attempts to out-patriot them. He can’t.
Indeed, conservatives view many provisions in the bill as undermining national security. And they certainly see the legislation as undermining the rule of law. To their minds, anyone who supports the bill doesn’t want to “do what’s right for America,” to use the president’s own words.
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The president find himself in a hornets’ nest now domestically on immigration as he has overseas on Iraq, but the difference is he has lost big parts of his base on immigration while still holding onto it on the war, at least for now.
If he has any doubts of how bad it could get for him on immigration, all he need do is get a transcript of the speech Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) gave on the House floor last night.
Rohrabacker, who would find a lot of agreement within the Republican conservative base but not only there repeatedly referred to the immigration bill as “pro-invasion” and as the “Bush-Kennedy” bill. He said Bush was allied with the “elite” including big business who wanted to assure a steady stream of cheap labor. He said some of the 9/11 hijackers would have qualified for the “amnesty” the current proposal represents.
The president has a domestic insurgency on his hands. And his words last week aimed at conservatives were the equivalent of “Bring it on.”