For a guy who claims to know more about immigration than anyone else in the room, McCain was late in getting the memo about what to call the legalization plan. Politico has found McCain comments from as late as 2003 candidly referring to legalization as “amnesty.” This really shouldn’t be surprising because that’s what amnesty means, but the pro-amnesty forces have been working to stigmatize the word since at least 2001. According to a Dallas Morning News story from August of that year, “the National Council of La Raza recommended to Mexican President Vicente Fox that he not utter the ‘A’ word. Focus group testing found that respondents voiced more resistance to the word than to the proposed policy itself, said La Raza president Raul Yzaguirre.”