Heartless Bitter Clingers, On the Move! It’s always about respect. Telling voters who worry about illegal immgration that they don’t “have a heart” is dissing, not disagreeing. If Rick Perry had said “I’m sorry, I understand the arguments against it but I just don’t have the heart to tell those kids ‘no,’ and I don’t think we should do that as a society. There’s a place for compassion,” I don’t think his debate remark would have stirred up nearly as much resentment, though substantively it would have amounted to the same thing. Luckily, Perry didn’t say it that way. …
P.S.: It’s a little like what they teach you in Parent School–tell your kid he’s “been bad,” not that he “is bad.” Except in this case it’s also an open issue as to what’s actually bad. …
P.P.S.: Perry may have phrased it the way he did because he doesn’t see his tuition stand as a compassionate exception to an otherwise rigorous system of border enforcement. He sees it as part of a full-throated, emotional ethnic pander that will to help him in the general election. Too bad he might not get there. …
Reminder: Perry’s stand on in-state tuition for illegal immigrants is small potatoes, the least of his sins in the eyes of immigration-controllers. His support for an amnesty and his opposition to both a border fence and the E-Verify system are the big potatoes. Perry’s obnoxious defense of the tuition subsidies could actually serve him well if it deflects press questions on those bigger topics. …
Bonus Fratricidal P.S.: Dick Morris says immigration’s a powerful issue because it is “like one of those Freudian blank screens where everybody projects on to it their view of what the most importants problems are. If you think jobs are the most important problem you’re worried that immigrants are taking away your jobs. If you believe that the cost of college is the major issue, you’re focused on in-state college for illegal immigrants” and so on and so on for “crime” and even “traffic.” This reminds me a bit too much of what they used to say about welfare–that opponents of the old AFDC system were projecting their feelings about race, crime, declining status, etc. onto the issue. Why wasn’t a concern about welfare a concern about welfare? And why isn’t concern over uncontrolled illegal immigration a Freudian blank screen on which we project … all our concerns about uncontrolled illegal immigration? … It’s a powerful issue because uncontrolled illegal immigration leads to a lot of bad things! Voters are even capable of worrying about jobs and crime and tuition costs and traffic (and the morality of rewarding illegality) all at the same time! Sometimes overanalysis = condescension.
Or maybe we only cling to our opposition to illegal immigration because traffic’s so bad. …