Creeping Irrelevance

I recall after the 1994 GOP earthquake when the biggest question about Bill Clinton was whether he was even relevant anymore - a rather remarkable thing to suggest of the most powerful man on the planet. He seemed to have doubts himself, as on several occasions he went out of his way to insist that yes, he was still relevant. It took him a year, but he did indeed regain his mojo, thanks to a critical bit of Republican overreaching in the budget showdown.

After President Bush's much pre-balleyhooed immigration speech tonight - which it did not even occur to me to watch, much less live-blog - I'm starting to get that same feeling about Dubya. And he hasn't lost his congressional majorities yet.

I first learned of the televised Oval Office address from Double-H, who, naturally, had high hopes for it:

The President's speech on Monday night is a huge moment for him, a rare chance to recapture the momentum on the issue of border security and with it, renew the country's confidence in his commitment tonational security, a confidence first shaken by the ports deal, and eroded by the long negotiations to form the Iraqi government....

The President needs to announce that the Guard will indeed be deployed in support of the Customs and Border personnel, but that the key to lasting border security is the dramatic expansion of border fencing in keeping with the House bill.

He should urge that the Senate adopt the House language in this regard (along with any other language necessary to assure that the construction of the seven hundred miles of fencing not be subject to any other law that might inhibit the quick start and completion of the projects.)

He must avoid the word "virtual," as in "virtual fencing." The White House isn't surrounded by a "virtual fence," and voters have no faith in "virtual fences" except as supplements to the real thing.

If the President comes out early and hard in favor of expanding the fences along the border which have already worked so successfully in urban areas, he will have met the American public where it is with what it demands.

As Hugh acknowledged elsewhere in his post, virtually nobody on the pro-enforcement side of the illegal immigration debate - which is to say approximately two-thirds of the American citizenry - was going to buy any "get tough" pitch the President offered absent any real, and permanent, enforcement proposals (i.e. the fence) because his track record is entirely opposed to enforcement. Commentary along this line raged the entire weekend.

Deborah Orin leaked in the New York Post that we were going to get the "virtual fence" canard. For the record, the word "virtual" didn't appear at all in the speech; however, the word "fence" only appeared twice:

"We will construct high-tech fences in urban corridors..."

"The Guard will assist the Border Patrol by operating surveillance systems, analyzing intelligence, installing fences and vehicle barriers, building patrol roads, and providing training.

Does "high-tech" substitute for "virtual"? I don't see any mention of or support for the seven hundred miles of actual fence included in the House immigration bill.

This morning Double-H was raising the stakes to the stratosphere:

Peel split the Tories over corn. Gladstone split the Liberals over Ireland. The Democrats split over the Civil War, and a hundred years later over civil rights, Vietnam and the Soviet threat.

Will the GOP split over border security? The answer will be in tonight's speech, which could be a huge boon for the President and the GOP, but could also be a disaster if the Adminsitration and Beltway experts refuse to take the base seriously.

He also was not buying the National Guard deployment gimmick:

National Guard deployments may signal some temporary tightening of the border, but the refusal to embrace the House program to extend existing fencing by seven hundred miles, and to do so with a crash construction effort, will be to signal unseriousness on border security of a thorough-going sort.

Neither was Congressman and anti-illegal immigration crusader Tom Tancredo - not so much the idea itself, but Bush's actual commitment to it:

"I hate to be too cynical about this, but my guess is it is simply being done to influence the debate in the Senate and in the House on the immigration package," Tancredo told Knight Ridder news on Friday. "And once the debate is over, we'll go back to business as usual."

The Colorado Republican said he fears that Bush is merely "is hoping to take the argument off the table that we're not doing enough on the enforcement side so that they can get the bill passed giving him an amnesty/guest-worker plan, and that will be the last you hear about securing the borders."

David Frum was openly derisive:

When the Bush Administration fitfully attempts to enforce the immigration laws, it looks for measures that meet four criteria:

They must be 1) spectacular; 2) expensive; 3) unsustainable; and 4) ineffective.

The proposal to deploy the National Guard to the border meets all four!

This plan won't work, and it is not seriously meant to work. It's supposed to look dramatic and buy the President some respite from negative polls - and then it is supposed to fail, strengthening the Administration's case for its truly preferred approach: amnesty + guestworkers.

Frum argues that even fencing off the entire Southern border will be pointless without enforcement in the interior of the country:

Create an accessible, reliable system for employers to confirm the legal status of their employees; require employers to use it; check compliance; and punish cheaters - that's what you have to do to enforce the law. If don't do that, you can send the National Guard to occupy Mexico City or dig a moat along the Rio Grande and fill it with man-eating alligators, and it won't matter: Your enforcement will fail.

He then makes a predictive condemnation of this White House that ought to have Karl Rove crapping his pants:

Tonight...the Administration will do something that cannot be respected. It will misrepresent its actual policies. It will say one thing and do another - a recurring vice of this Administration's policymaking, alas. It will promise enforcement in ways it knows will fail - and it will then use the expected failure to justify doing the exact opposite.

That's pretty shabby politics. It's also pretty dumb politics - so dumb that it raises this question: Could the President possibly want the GOP to lose in November 2006? [emphasis added]

Disclaimer: I'm not ready to go quite THAT far. But Frum's theory is balefully compelling:

A Democratic Congress would give the President the amnesty + guestworker program that remains as his only possible domestic legislative legacy. A Republican Congress - or rather a Republican House - won't....

But wait: Wouldn't a Democratic Congress make the Administration's life miserable? Would it not persecute the administration with subpoenas and oversight and possibly impeachment hearings? Yes, so it would. And it would do something else too: It would rally the Republican base to the President. [emphasis added]

Or so Karl Rove may be thinking, if he is not, after all, the Machiavellian genius of his public reputation. I think the notion of pissing off your own base in order to keep them at home on Election Day and tank Congress to the other side to, in turn, use the other side to inspire that same base to follow you again when you're not doing anything for them now and don't plan to in the future, is stark-raving daft. Far more likely is that disaffected Republicans would, at the very least, sit back and let Bush suffer the consequences of his own folly just like they stayed home when it was time to vote, and at worst actively cheer the Donk impeachers on. It wouldn't be being "too clever by half"; it would be more like being frontally lobotomized.

Makes me wonder, come to think of it, if that didn't, at some point, become one of the reasons why the Clinton White House kept pushing HillaryCare far past the point when its policy death and political toxicity became indisputable.

In any case, whatever one thinks of the National Guard deployment bullet point, the funding for it is tucked into - you guessed it - the Senate amnesty bill. Or, in Frum's words:

[T]he National Guard is not there to enforce the law. It's there as a hostage to compel the House to surrender to the President and the Senate - or else face the wrath of National Guardsmen and their families.

Oooooh, I'm glad I'm sitting down. This stuff makes me feel like I did as a kid in the back seat on a long car trip, which always made me car-sick. But it's just disgruntled, "friendly-fire" speculation, right? Surely sunny Hugh's expectations were fulfilled in spades, right?

Um, no.

Double-H was ecstatic - at first:

My interview with Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security Julie Myers staggered me, undoing in a handful of minutes my confidence in the President's commitment to border security first. Either the President's team had not communicated effectively with sub-cabinet appointees about the fence, or the President doesn't really believe in the fence, because Assistant Secretary Myers is clearly not a proponent of the fence.

Memo to Tony Snow: The blogosphere/talk radio callers/e-mailers are turning against this speech in a decisive fashion. They simply do not believe the Administration is really committed to border enforcement, and the spokespeople sent out to back up the President's message aren't doing that job. Period.

"Staggered," indeed. You know what's really staggering? It comes across like unintended candor. Like Myers honestly put over the White House's real immigration position not realizing that she was supposed to - there's really no other word for it - lie about it instead.

Maybe that's why the Right is turning against the President's speech - and what explains this CNN poll result.

Cap'n Ed's take was an underwhelmed "Well, what did you expect?" True to his public persona, Bush stuck with what he believes, in the full teeth of the public at large and much of his own party in particular. Untrue to his public persona, he did so - again, there's no other adjective that fits - dishonestly.

Brother Meringoff called the speech "self-defeating," because Bush's "path to citizenship" is still an amnesty, and that will "invite further waves of illegal immigration." Which could, if Newt Gingrich was correct yesterday on Press the Meat, produce a human tsunami:

Show up in the U.S. for the next amnesty. It was three million last time, it’s going to be—the estimate, by the way, which I think will come out from the Heritage Foundation tomorrow is that the bill in the Senate is between thirty and fifty million people ultimately allowed to become citizens under the extended family provision in this bill. Thirty to fifty million people. [emphases added]

Suddenly Tony Blankley's hyperbole of the entire human race stampeding to the fruited plain doesn't seem too hyperbolic anymore. We're struggling to retain any sort of common American civic and cultural identity as it is; but thirty to fifty million more? Or a hundred million?? Or TWO-HUNDRED SEVENTEEN MILLION??? In the next TWENTY YEARS???? We'll be swamped; we'll, in nation-state terms, capsize. Our entitlements edifice, already overextended and tottering, will collapse years prematurely, and bring our economy down with it. It will be national suicide of the opposite sort from the path of "Old" Europe and Russia: not depopulation, but a passive invasion on a scale unimaginable.

And most, if not all, of them will be brainwashed to vote Democrat, consigning the GOP to the permanent political wilderness again, most likely permanently. Because there's no way, never has been, never will be, that Republicans will EVER out-Bolshevik the Democrats. Is that what George Bush wants? Has he been, in fact, the ultimate Donk mole?

Ugh, I'm getting nauseous again.

Brother Hinderaker was a lot more direct:

He had his chance, and he blew it. He should have given the speech I told him to. As soon as he started talking about guest worker programs and the impossibility of deporting 11 million illegals, it was all over. President Bush keeps trying to find the middle ground, on this and many other issues. But sometimes, there isn't a viable middle ground. This is one of those instances.

President Bush is being destroyed by vicious people who hate him. So far, he hasn't seemed to notice. Apparently, he doesn't think he needs any allies. He certainly didn't win any with tonight's speech. [emphasis added]

*Sigh*

The Hispanic American Coalition opposes amnesty. I thought Bush and Rove were trying to glom the Hispanic vote. Democrats are preparing to scoop up the center-right anti-illegal immigration voters the President is throwing away, even as they work to give him his amnesty bill - proving that they'll always be better shysters than he is. And reconquistadors are poised to herd those voters straight into the Donk column by their chronic, undisciplined extremism that Dubya appears determined to reward.

They say that the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy. I have no idea if I'm anything close to a representative barometer of the GOP grassroots. Probably not, since I'll do my duty and vote in November, and I can't imagine ever voting for a Democrat ever again. But after reading the transcript of tonight's address to the nation, I can safely say that I didn't miss much, and don't care much that I missed it. Almost as if what President Bush had to say didn't matter.

As if it was...irrelevant.

As he himself is rapidly becoming.

I think I'll go take some Drammamine now.

UPDATE: Tomorrow's Day-by-Day strip says it all.