It’s a good bet history will remember this presidential election as one in which a candidate, faced with polls that showed the contest was too close to call, shamelessly pandered to one of his party’s constituencies to boost their turnout and his chances of victory.
History will recall that, in a
widely covered speech, this guy sounded as though he had less concern for the
law of the land than the arch of his political ambition. And it will conclude
that in the wake of that grossly political moment, he showed no contrition for
his hurtful act.
Though his Republican critics claim
that President Obama’s decision to stop the deportation of young people — most
of them Hispanics — who entered this country illegally as children was a
crassly political action, what Obama did last week doesn’t compare with
Reagan’s action in 1980.
In a White House Rose Garden speech
Friday, Obama used his executive authority to order an immediate stop to
efforts to return these young people to countries many of them left before they
even learned to speak. Instead, they will get a temporary reprieve until
Congress enacts a badly needed immigration reform law.
“It seems the president has put
election-year politics above responsible policies,” Sen. Charles Grassley of
Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in a statement
released by his office.
But while the president’s action is
clearly intended to court Hispanics, whose votes in the battleground states of
Florida, Nevada, Colorado, Virginia and North Carolina could tilt the election
to Obama, it was as much an act of compassion as politics.
The same can’t be said for what
Reagan did. Shortly after the 1980 GOP convention, Reagan went to Philadelphia,
Miss., scene of one of the civil rights era’s most brutal crimes, to launch his
campaign to unseat President Carter. In his speech, Reagan told his audience,
“I believe in states’ rights,” which, then and now, are buzzwords for those who
want to undo the civil rights gains blacks made in the 1960s.
In 1968, Republican Richard Nixon
used a race-baiting “Southern strategy” of appeasement of Southern racists to
help him win the presidency. It also turned the party of Abraham Lincoln into
the party of Strom Thurmond. But in 1976, Carter reversed that gain when he won
every state of the old Confederacy except Virginia and put the White House back
in the Democratic Party column.
What Reagan did in 1980 to defeat
Carter far exceeds what Obama has done to court Hispanic voters in a race with
Republican Mitt Romney that many analysts say is too close to call.
Obama’s suspension of the
deportation of children brought into this country illegally is as much a
humanitarian act as a political gesture. It doesn’t sit well with
right-wingers, I suspect, because they are more concerned with who is allowed
to migrate into this country than with whether they got here legally.
They want to slow the arrival of the
day, projected to be around 2050, when minorities in the U.S. will outnumber
non-Hispanic whites. This is what they mean when they say, “I want my country
back.”
This is the view of America that
Reagan emboldened with his states’ rights speech.
And it is the antithesis of the
message of inclusion that Obama sent when he announced a decision that’s not
only, for him, good politics — but also is good public policy in this nation of
immigrants.
