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To: Karl Rove, Office of the Panopticon, the White House, Washington D.C. From: Nick Machiavelli, Senior Partner, Machiavelli, O'Blarney, Iago, Alcibiades, and Morris. Political Consultants.
Well, Karl, am I psychic or what? Just minutes before your call, I turned to Lucretia and said, "We should be hearing from young Rove any minute now, darling. The president's poll ratings just fell 10 points to 62 percent. And Karl is a quick worry. He won't wait until they hit 50 before he turns to his friends for help." To tell it straight, though, I would never have predicted exactly what worried you? Dick Gephardt? At this stage of the game? I would have guessed that you would be ringing me about how to handle Saddam Hussein. Then I saw Gephardt's speech to the National Council of La Raza at which he promised to bring in legislation to legalize the status of millions of illegal immigrants — eight million at the last count, the numbers boys tell me — who have lived in the U.S. for five years and worked for two years. And I said to myself: So that's why Karl is so frantic. Now, as best I understand your anxiety — and to be frank, there were times when you were hard to follow — the problem is that you are being seen and raised on the immigration issue. And, worse, there may be nothing you can do about it. Your idea of using immigration as an issue to win Hispanic votes over the GOP was always a risky venture. Yes, Hispanic voters are likely to grow as a percentage of the electorate for the foreseeable future. And unless immigration laws are tightened and our borders policed more effectively, they will account for only a little short of a quarter of the voting population by 2050. So it seemed to you a no-brainer to offer to legalize illegal aliens — a high percentage of whom are Latinos, maybe 70 percent — in order to win a larger share of the Hispanic vote and thus of the entire electorate. There were, however, two political risks embedded in this argument even before September 11. To begin with, there is little evidence that Hispanics already here favor either high levels of legal immigration or legalizing the illegal kind. Indeed, opinion polls suggest that Hispanic voters have almost the same opinions to the rest of the voting population on both issues — namely, that they are opposed to both by only slightly lower majorities than everyone else. And there was no evidence at all that Hispanics would vote Republican in greater numbers because the GOP relaxed immigration rules. What the evidence did show — with increasing clarity in California's elections — was that Hispanic voters were likely to vote heavily Democratic because being poorer than the average Californian, they favored Democratic policies on economic policy, welfare, and so on. Hence the more Hispanic voters there were, owing to higher immigration levels from Mexico, the more likely the Hispanic vote (and thus the entire electorate) would be skewed in the Donkey's direction. The second risk was that an amnesty would alienate the great majority of other voters who have always been in favor of tougher immigration controls. In particular they are strongly opposed to giving an amnesty to illegal immigrants. The Republican base is even more strongly opposed than the electorate as a whole. And that is only a little short of 50 per cent of the electorate — at least it is today. Now, you might have thought that you could finesse your way around those obstacles by drawing on Bush's popularity, highlighting other issues like the booming stock market (hey, just kidding), and hinting more or less subtly that anyone opposing an amnesty was a racist, a nativist, or a xenophobe. And, to be fair, such tactics might just have worked before September 11 when most voters were not paying much attention to immigration, legal or illegal. After September 11, however, immigration was on everybody's mind. Given that all the terrorists who brought down the twin towers were immigrants, most of them here illegally, immigration suddenly became a hot topic. In addition to their previous anxieties that high levels of immigration lowered the living standards of poorer Americans and threatened the nation with cultural balkanization, voters were suddenly worried that uncontrolled and illegal immigration could actually kill them. Time to forget the issue and emphasize something else — the GOP as the small investors' party (pally, don't be so sensitive.) At which point, Dick Gephardt came up with a bill to legalize all those illegal. And in one swell foop, he put you on the spot. Because Gephardt can afford to take what is a modest risk for a Democratic politician. The base support of his party is more dependent on recent immigrant communities than the GOP and much less dependent on voters who have doubts about immigration. But the net result is that GOP is now caught in a very unpleasant dilemma. If the Republicans oppose Gephardt's amnesty, they will actually lose ground among Hispanics because they will then have raised and disappointed hopes. They will have announced the amnesty as a test of not being a nativist — and then failed it. If, on the other hand, they go along with Gephardt's amnesty, they will annoy and dispirit their base among both non-Hispanic voters and Hispanics who prefer to adopt an unhypenated American identity — without winning a significant number of new Hispanic converts. So they will lose votes yet again. And if they try to outbid Gephardt, they will fail miserably. For whatever the GOP offers, he can always offer more. The prudent thing to do here, Karl, would be to reverse course entirely and cut the levels of immigration that are moving the GOP inexorably into second place everywhere. Unless that is done, the GOP is sliding into electoral twilight. But, given that you and Junior have both invested enormous personal capital in presenting the GOP as a happy multicultural fiesta, I suspect that would be too much for either of you to swallow psychologically. So what can I tell you? Frankly, Karl, I really cannot improve on the advice offered by the Duke of Wellington to a young British officer who came to him with an equally intractable problem: "You seem to have got yourself into a pretty pickle, Sir, and you must do your best to get out of it." With
sincere best wishes, P.S. Please send my usual fee to the Austin branch of the Bank of Tijuana — you know the account, think of a number, multiply by nine, etc., etc. As agreed you will also refund in full my purchase from certain anonymous clients of stock options (slightly used) in Harken and Haliburton at the stock price prevailing on January 1, 2000. And, no, I will not be needing a cabin on the Republican National Committee "How Sweet It Is" Post-Election Cruise. |
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