Last week Barack Obama shelved plans to push his massive energy takeover to the forefront in order to straight-arm immigration legislation through Congress, making it his next new crises. Then up cropped the spill in the gulf.
So many crises, so little time.
It remains to be seen whether the Left’s reframing of Arizona’s tough new immigration reform law will work, but so far, it has not. What was shaping up as the greatest gunfight since the Earp brothers (all Republicans) shot down the Clanton gang at O.K. Corral now appears to be a dud.
Three national polls released in the last three days still show overwhelming support for tough immigration legislation, in spite of two lawsuits by the Left and high profile appearances by Al Sharpton and Linda Ronstadt to egg on protesters.
The polls conducted by Gallup, Angus Global Monitor, and Zogby range from 51% (Gallup) in favor of tough laws, to 79% (Zogby) saying that illegals are not entitled to the same rights and basic freedoms as US citizens.
Question: Is this simply backlash against the Left’s coordinated efforts orchestrated with the cooperation of the American media to recast the debate as racist, or is it something much larger?
The President has repeatedly fumbled the ball for Democrats on key issues: from the early midterm elections to this weeks oil spills he has not delivered with the star power that propelled him into office. He is scorned by foreign governments and his domestic agenda is in shambles.
Obama is still hugely, if not wildly, popular, and there is nothing the media would rather do than make him a winner in spite of his continual botching of key issues dear to their hearts.
But Republicans have the opportunity of a lifetime to turn both Immigration and Energy on Obama over the next few months. The nation is ready to listen.
The average American knows that Arizona’s immigration legislation has nothing to do with racial profiling and is certainly not racist in nature. How many people in this country employ Hispanic gardeners, handymen, housekeepers and other low-wage laborers without resident status? Millions. And most want to keep them.
Immigration is about developing and enacting a sane policy that will allow workers to migrate to this country safely, easily and legally. Nothing more. Laws currently on the federal books already provide the method. But the procedure should be streamlined so that migrants can drop by an American embassy and fill out a form, get a background, and be in the US in a month.
What about the Gulf? The US is a petroleum-based economy and no amount of “green” legislation can change that fact. Conversely, it will only serve to drive gas prices to unprecedented levels.
Forty years of Democrat stalemates created the crisis in the Gulf this week; oil companies have been regulated into drilling high-risk projects because they cannot get to the most accessible oil. Alaska is off limits, the coast of California is restricted, and Wyoming and Montana are out of bounds. And the US is sitting atop three trillion barrels of untapped, largely accessible oil, more than anywhere else on earth.
If the Republican Party will form a unified front on both of these issues in the coming days they can turn the Obama popularity swell once and for all. Both issues are touchy, but it can be done.
The media will continue to play up the May Day immigration protests, but 100,000 La Raza-led illegals in the streets of Dallas and Los Angeles do not a consensus make.
They will ignore Obama’s culpability in the oil disaster, but the GOP can bring it to light. The spill in the Gulf has enormous, crippling potential for jobs in the fishing and petroleum industries and far beyond. And much of it could have been averted if Obama had acted quickly.
Both of these issues are Democrat Achilles heels.
Left Coast Ledger 