Political consultants make their money in lots of ways, but one of the key insights into campaigns is not so much about picking candidates as it is in picking issues.
There is little question that most Democrats have assumed that a war that most Americans perceive as a disaster would be the issue on which they could defeat the Republicans in 2008.
Many Republicans assumed that the best chance they had for victory was a candidate who could articulate a case that the Democrats were still too soft on terror to be trusted.
Were they right? Recent events in Iraq, after the success of the troop surge many Democrats opposed, may mean that will be a point which may not work as well for them in the general election. But few Democratic voters care about whether a war they never supported is going better since they just want it to be over, no matter what we leave behind.
The main thing they seem to be looking for in a candidate is his or her ability to win. Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama promise victory. The differences between them seem to be more about personality, even though Obama and the other Dems who seek to avert a second Clinton presidency keep flailing away, trying to find some wedge issues.
On the Republican side, things are not quite so well defined.
While electability or opposing the Democrats’ drive to end the war regardless of the consequences may still motivate many Republicans, war and peace don’t seem to be what the 2008 GOP race is about. Instead, immigration and faith seem to be the main talking points.
That has been the inescapable conclusion for anyone who has watched the Republican debates. The two GOP front-runners – former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani and former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney – have been sniping at each other incessantly on immigration.
Prior to their running for president, both Giuliani and Romney realized the 10 million to 12 million illegals are an economic and political fact of life. They also used to understand that scapegoating these undocumented migrants – the overwhelming majority of whom came here to work – was something decent Americans just didn’t do.
Both have now rejected the better angels of the Republican nature as articulated by President Bush, who has tried unsuccessfully for years to get Congress to pass guest-worker programs and to find a way to give the illegals a path to citizenship.
Instead, Giuliani and Romney have led a race to the bottom of the political barrel on this point, causing fringe candidate Rep. Tom Tancredo, whose ludicrous call is for all illegals to be deported, to rightly say that it seemed as if both were echoing him.
For those who listen to right-wing talk-radio shows or monitor the GOP blogosphere, this doesn’t come as a surprise. Being “tough” on undocumented Latinos who’ve come here to bus tables at restaurants or clean hotel rooms is considered by many influential right-wingers to be as important as a willingness to be tough on Al Qaeda or Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Indeed, all too many Americans seem to have confused the question of what to do about people who have obeyed the laws of supply and demand, and crossed the border to find below-minimum-wage work, with that of Islamists who want to blow us up.
Though most of those who now say that they’re voting on immigration are not bigots themselves, they’re still feeding into a tradition of nativism that has deep and ugly roots in American history.
The rise of multiculturalism and wrongheaded educational policies that often de-emphasize assimilation into American culture has undermined the faith of many grandchildren of immigrants in a process their own families went through not so long ago.
But once you strip away the largely superficial contemporary talking points about securing the border against terror, all you’re left with is a sentiment that seems an echo of earlier “yellow peril” or anti-Irish, anti-Italian or anti-Jewish arguments that were heard in this country a century or more ago.
Men otherwise as sensible on economics and foreign policy as are Giuliani and Romney should know that obsessing about illegal immigrants is largely irrelevant to the prosperity and the security of this country.