"A Lot Of Noise"

Note to White House PR shop: if NRO is any indication, the base isn't buying the President's abrupt "get tough on border control" angle:

"We will not be able to effectively enforce our immigration laws until we create a temporary-worker program."

This was the animating idea of the President's immigration speech on Monday in Tucson. His litany of improvements in border security, and even his acknowledgement of the importance of interior enforcement, were clearly calculated to make his guest-worker-program-cum-amnesty more palatable to conservatives.

The current issue of Time magazine has a revealing quote from "a Republican official close to the White House" about the president's approach to supporters of immigration enforcement: "Bush decided to give these guys their rhetorical pound of flesh. In return, he wants a comprehensive bill, which is what he has always wanted. He's just going to lead with a lot of noise about border security."

As National Review editor Rich Lowry elaborates in his own reinforcing column, the open-borders crowd has emitted these bursts of "noise" before, and always with the same dismal result:

If the policy debate plays out the way the White House wants [The House, where conservatives have the most sway, passes a bill with new enforcement measures, only to see the Senate pass a different bill with an amnesty and guest-worker program, which will be shoved down the throats of the House on a take-it-or-leave-it basis], we will have another iteration of a bizarre dynamic of American politics. Every time there is agitation about out-of-control levels of immigration, Washington acts — to preserve or increase current levels of immigration. As Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies notes, this is what happened in 1986, 1990, and 1996. The White House and the Senate want 2006 to be Act IV in the farce. Senator Arlen Specter's version of "reform" doubles legal immigration.

If the policy debate turns out that way - again - after the President made such a point of telling the grassroots what it wanted to hear, GOP voters will have one more reason to stay home and watch infomercials next November 7th, while illegal aliens perhaps prove the decisive factor in unseating the majority that would not listen.

I mean, c'mon, "Border Security Month"? That's like the immigration policy equivalent of Gerald Ford's "Whip Inflation Now" buttons....