You know, next Tuesday.
“I can promise that I will try to do it in the first year of my second term,” President Obama recently told Enrique Acevedo, an anchor at the Spanish language television network Univision. Obama was talking about comprehensive immigration reform, which would regularize the status of more than ten million people living in this nation illegally.
On the same subject, four years ago, then-Senator Obama told the League of United Latin American Citizens: “We need to do it by the end of my first term as President of the United States of America. And I will make it a top priority in my first year as president.”
This earlier promise, of course, was never honored. And voters who care about this issue would do well to note how easy it would have been for Obama to keep it, how little he did to keep it and how impossible it will be to pass any immigration reform bill in a second Obama term.
Between July 2009 (when Al Franken, D-Minn., was sworn into the Senate) and February 2010 (the seating of Scott Brown, R-Mass.), Obama enjoyed a strong House majority and 60 Democrats in the 100-member Senate. Throughout the 111th Congress, there were at least five and as many as eight Republican senators, including Brown, who might have broken from the “anti-amnesty” orthodoxy on comprehensive immigration reform, if Obama had lifted a finger to press the issue with them or with his own party. He never tried. Some Obama “top priorities” are more “top” than others.
By the time Obama made the Democratic faithful in Congress walk the plank for his health care bill, it was too late. He was gearing up for the 2010 elections, urging Hispanic political leaders to stop complaining about his inaction on immigration and start attacking Republicans instead. Democrats lost the House and six Senate seats, and the window for comprehensive immigration reform closed, possibly for this decade.
If Obama wins a second term, it is hard to see how immigration will come up except as a political football — the kind he holds out for Hispanic voters to kick, only to pull it away at the last moment.
Yeah, well, what are they going to do, vote for anti-immigrant xenophobic Republicans who want them stopped in the street and checked for everything from voter registration and legal papers to tamale peddling licenses? Ha.
Fall in line and help Obama fight your enemies, pendejos. Or else it’s back to the third-world with you!
Perhaps Hispanic voters — at least the ones who consider immigration reform important — will take Obama’s promise seriously, and keep playing Charlie Brown the field goal kicker to Obama’s Lucy. Then again, perhaps they will look at what happened to Obama’s first promise and catch on to the fact that they are being played.
That would only happen if the Democrats and Obama believed that particular voting bloc sharp enough to call him on his bullshit. He doesn’t. And it looks to me like he’s betting on that very belief in 2012.
Funny how many of the “Hispanic” nationalists and activists back the very fraud who continues to play them like chumps. Why, it’s almost as if these “leaders” are every bit as stupid as Obama seems to think they are — and in fact, relies on them to be.
Oh, the irony.
Going with the Wimpy stance doesn’t seem like a good strategy on its face. But then, maybe the bulk of his voters have never seen a Popeye cartoon.
“Regularize the status”? WTF?
As to the Hispanic ‘leaders’, I’m sure they’ve been ‘taken care of’ for for their regularized chumpiness.
Funny how many of the “Hispanic” nationalists and activists back the very fraud who continues to play them like chumps.
You’d better specify that you’re talking about CNN’s vaunted “White Hispanics,” lest somebody develop super-hearing and notice your dog whistle.
Why would the Democrats worry about immigration reform when illegals can vote now any way? If Mexicans really want immigration reform, they need to get behind voter ID laws, then the Democrats will have to give them citizenship to get their votes.
People don’t understand the Chicago Way at all.
::is duly impressed by proper use of expletive::
Nishi and gullible Latinos hardest hit.
Obama will gladly fight for immigration reform . . . . . . and Fluffy.
JG,
You fight for a world that will never exist… although it actaully brieflydid. There are those that stand with you… will they be cowed? Now that is the question isn’t it. Reformers indeed.