To get back to Hillary, one can't help but wonder why she endorsed the Spitzer plan--or quasi-endorsed it or semi-endorsed it or whatever she did when Tim Russert questioned her on the matter. Perhaps she was a prisoner of her conscience, and was courageously willing to accept the political consequences for taking an unpopular position. (I'll pause for a moment to give you a chance to wipe the coffee off your computer screen.)
To find the answer to this puzzler, apply Occam's Razor--Senator Clinton had no idea how unpopular her semi-position would be. Indeed, the entire Democratic slate of presidential aspirants still doesn't grasp the visceral reactions that illegal immigration elicits. Here's another nugget from the Quinnipiac Ohio poll: 61 percent oppose giving a public school education to the children of illegal immigrants.
Politicians who favor educating the children of illegal immigrants and finding a path to legal status for those kids' parents often applaud themselves for holding the sensible middle ground on this issue. But they're wrong. As the Quinnipiac poll proves, the middle of the illegal immigration issue lies elsewhere.
AND THEN THERE'S the significance of the illegal immigration issue to a lot of people. When the topic of illegal immigration enters the conversation, it tends to drown out everything else. Anyone who was paying attention in June when the McCain/Kennedy debate reached a fever pitch would know that. Bizarrely, most members of Congress and the media decided to blame that firestorm on talk radio, simultaneously overestimating talk radio's ability to
move the debate and underestimating the importance of this issue to the public.
As for Hillary, she effectively recovered from her Buckner-ing of the illegal immigration question in the last debate. It was easy. After all, she's among fellow Democrats, all of whom are just as bad or even worse than she is on illegal immigration.
But the general election will be a different story. She'll be facing a Republican nominee who is a hardliner on illegal immigration, something that will put him squarely in the middle of the electorate. Hillary may want to move rightward once she's got the nomination, but she can't. While the campaign is young, she's already had her "I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it" moment.
The Republican nominee won't be reluctant to assail her on that fact. The Democrats had to pull their punches; while some of them may be against the drivers' license idiocy, they're all pro-amnesty and they all supported McCain/Kennedy. In other words, to amplify Broder's "iceberg" metaphor, all the Democrats can do is squabble about what quarters of the Titanic each candidate gets to occupy.
Dean Barnett is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
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