Excerpted from the National Review Online:
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Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Democrats and Illegals [John Derbyshire]
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And boy, HRC really went hurtling base over apex on the drivers license thing, didn't she? Radio Derb has neen noting for a couple of weeks now the roaring silence on this topic from both our U.S. senators. That—from HRC's point of view—is the problem with debates. You get asked stuff.

The Dems really have a problem with illegal immigration. John Gizzi has an excellent report in the 10/29 issue of Human Events (though I can't find it on the web). He's reporting on the recent (10/16) special U.S. House election for the Massachusetts 5th district. The district's as Democratic as you like—only 14 percent GOP registration, 57 percent for Kerry in '04, etc. The Dem candidate was Niki Tsongas, widow of local giant (amd '92 presidential candidate) Paul Tsongas, and she had the whole gang out there campaigning for her: Ted Kennedy, Nancy Pelosi, Bill Clinton. The Republican challenger, Jim Ogonowski, in spite of being short of cash, got 45 percent of the vote against Tsongas's 51 percent—a stunning result in the circumstances. He'd leaned hard on the issue of illegal immigration, including the issuing of drivers licenses. ("On the Sunday before the balloting, Tsongas made headlines by saying she would support allowing illegal immigrants to receive driver's licenses...")

The inner contradiction for the Democrats on this issue is really starting to show. The party of working people and blacks simply cannot go on saying nothing about an issue that hurts nobody as much as it hurts working people and blacks. The impression one gets is that in so far as the Dems have any strategy at all on the issue, it is to:

*Shout "racist!" at anyone who mentions illegal immigration.
*Get as many illegals on the voting rolls as possible. (This is the entire point of New York Gov. Spitzer's drivers-license scheme.)
*Long-term, to run out the clock until that happy day—seen by them as a sort of Democratic eschaton—when immigration, legal and illegal, has made the country majority-minority.

This was once a great party. It was once a patriotic party. What a falling-off there has been!

10/31 10:01 AM

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