Immigration as an iceberg?

David Broder:

As the Democratic presidential race finally gets down to brass tacks, two issues are becoming paramount. But only one of them is clearly on the table.

That is the issue of illegal immigration. A very smart Democrat, a veteran of the Clinton administration, told me that he expects it to be a key part of any Republican campaign and that he is worried about his party's ability to respond.

I think he has good reason to worry. The failure of the Democratic Congress, like its Republican predecessor, to enact comprehensive immigration reform, including improved border security, has left individual states and local communities to struggle with the problem. Some are showing a high degree of tolerance and flexibility. Others are being more punitive. But all of them are running into controversy.

I noticed a new Siena College Research Institute poll of registered voters in New York. It found heavy opposition to Gov. Eliot Spitzer's proposal to permit undocumented aliens to obtain driver's licenses; nearly two-thirds opposed the latest version.

Moreover, the issue is part of a weakening of support for Spitzer, who now has an almost 2-to-1 negative job rating and, for the first time, an unfavorable image overall. Asked if they are inclined to support him for reelection in 2010, only 25 percent said yes, while 49 percent said they would prefer an anonymous "someone else." It was just last year that Spitzer was elected in a landslide. Spitzer announced yesterday that he was abandoning the driver's license idea.

That is New York, home state of both Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani. And the driver's license question is the one that tripped up Clinton when she was asked about it at the Philadelphia debate last month and gave answers that were indecisive -- and nearly indecipherable.

The other candidates had more time to compose an answer, so they were spared the embarrassment. It was the pummeling she received from Barack Obama and John Edwards during and after that debate (and from moderator Tim Russert) that brought her husband, former president Bill Clinton, into the campaign, with the charge, as he put it, that "those boys have been getting tough on her lately."

The former president's intervention -- volunteered during a campaign appearance on her behalf in South Carolina -- raised the second, and largely unspoken, issue identified by my friend from the Clinton administration: the two-headed campaign and the prospect of a dual presidency.

In his view, which I share, this is a prospect that will test the tolerance of the American people far more severely than the possibility of the first female president -- or, for that matter, the first black president.

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I disagree with Broder on the latter "problem." The only reason Hillary's campaign is viable is because it is perceived by many to be bill's third term. Without him in the picture she would likely be in the * category.

The reason Democrats perceive immigration as a problem is because their instincts place them on the wrong side of the issue as Spitzer has demonstrated. It is not tricky or difficult to be on the winning side of this issue. It is called the rule of law. The Democrats are in trouble because they have convinced themselves that the immigration laws cannot be enforced as written. The fact is tht they do not want to enforce them as written.

They tend to argue from the false premise that you cannot deport all the people that got here illegally because the laws were not enforced. They ignore the fact that enforcement will lead to self deportation as it already has in places like Oklahoma where tough new laws have led to illgal immigrants fleeing the state. It has also happened in local communities with tougher enforcement and cooperation with ICE. So the answer is before them, they just do not want to enforce the law and that is their problem. They tend to see enforcement as the problem rather than the solution. But after enforcement would come a regularized process for controlling immigration that would benefit the immigrant and the country. For some reason they cannot see that far ahead.