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Ärende: If Only Arizona ...
===========================
... were the Real Problem
 
 By FRANK RICH

DON'T blame it all on Arizona. The Grand Canyon State simply happened to be in
the right place at the right time to tilt over to the dark side. Its hysteria
is but another symptom of a political virus that can't be quarantined and whose
cure is as yet unknown.

If many of Arizona's defenders and critics hold one belief in common, it's that
the new "show me your papers" law is sui generis: it's seen as one angry border
state's response to its outsized share of America's illegal immigration crisis.
But to label this development "Arizona's folly" trivializes its import and
reach. The more you examine the law's provisions and proponents, the more you
realize that it's the latest and (so far) most vicious battle in a far broader
movement that is not just about illegal immigrants — and that is steadily
increasing its annexation of one of America's two major political parties.

Arizonans, like all Americans, have every right to be furious about
Washington's protracted and bipartisan failure to address the immigration
stalemate. To be angry about illegal immigration is hardly tantamount to being
a bigot. But the Arizona law expressing that anger is bigoted, and in a very
particular way. The law dovetails seamlessly with the national "Take Back
America" crusade that has attended the rise of Barack Obama and the
accelerating demographic shift our first African-American president represents.

The crowd that wants Latinos to show their papers if there's a "reasonable
suspicion" of illegality is often the same crowd still demanding that the
president produce a document proving his own citizenship. Lest there be any
doubt of that confluence, Rush Limbaugh hammered the point home after Obama
criticized Arizona's action. "I can understand Obama being touchy on the
subject of producing your papers," he said. "Maybe he's afraid somebody's going
to ask him for his." Or, as Glenn Beck chimed in about the president last week:
"What has he said that sounds like American?"

To the "Take Back America" right, the illegitimate Obama is Illegal Alien No.
1. It's no surprise that of the 35 members of the Arizona House who voted for
the immigration law (the entire Republican caucus), 31 voted soon after for
another new law that would require all presidential candidates to produce birth
certificates to qualify for inclusion on the state's 2012 ballot. With the
whole country now watching Arizona, that "birther" bill was abruptly yanked
Thursday.

The legislators who voted for both it and the immigration law were exclusively
Republicans, but what happened in the Arizona G.O.P. is not staying in Arizona.
Officials in at least 10 other states are now teeing up their own new
immigration legislation. They are doing so even in un-Arizonan places like
Ohio, Missouri, Maryland and Nebraska, none of them on the Department of
Homeland Security's 2009 list of the 10 states that contain three-quarters of
America's illegal immigrant population.

Outbreaks of nativist apoplexy are nothing new in American history. The last
derailed George W. Bush's apparently earnest effort to get a bipartisan
immigration compromise through the Senate in 2007. At the time, the more
egregious expressions of anti-immigrant rage — including Arizona's
self-appointed border-patrol militia, the Minutemen — were stigmatized as a
fringe by the White House and much of the G.O.P. establishment. John McCain,
though facing a tough fight for the Republican presidential nomination, signed
on to the Bush reform effort despite being slimed by those in his party's base
who accused him of supporting "amnesty."

What a difference the Tea Party makes. This time McCain endorsed his state's
new immigration law as "a good tool" and "a very important step forward," and
propagandized in favor of it with his widely ridiculed televised canard that
illegal immigrants were "intentionally causing accidents on the freeway."
McCain, like other mainstream conservative Republicans facing primaries this
year, is now fighting for his political life against a Tea Party-supported
radical. His opponent, the former congressman and radio shock jock J. D.
Hayworth, is an unabashed birther who frames the immigration debate as an
opportunity to "stand up for our culture," presumably against all immigrants,
legal and illegal alike. In this political climate, he could well win.

McCain, like Arizona, shouldn't be singled out for censure: He is far from
alone in cowering before his party's extremists. Neither Mitch McConnell, John
Boehner nor Eric Cantor dared say a word against Arizona's law. Mitt Romney,
who was mocked during the 2008 campaign for having employed undocumented
Guatemalan immigrants as landscapers on his Massachusetts estate, tried to
deflect the issue by vacillating (as usual). So did Mike Huckabee, who told The
Dallas Morning News last week that "it's not my place to agree or disagree"
with what happened in Arizona. If it's not the place of a talk-show host and
prospective presidential candidate to take a stand on an issue of this moment,
whose place is it? There are few profiles in courage among the leaders in this
G.O.P. — only a lot of guys hiding under their desks.

The one group of Republicans that has been forthright in criticizing the
Arizona law is the Bush circle: Jeb Bush, the former speechwriter Michael
Gerson, the Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge, the adviser Mark McKinnon
and, with somewhat more equivocal language, Karl Rove. McKinnon and Rove know
well that Latino-bashing will ultimately prove political suicide in a century
when Hispanic Americans are well on their way to becoming the largest minority
in the country and are already the swing voters in many critical states.

The Bushies, however, have no power and no juice in the new conservative order.
The former president is nearly as reviled in some Tea Party circles as Obama
is. Even conservatives as seemingly above reproach as Senator Lindsey Graham of
South Carolina now invite the nastiest of blow-back if they fail Tea Party
purity tests. When Graham had the gall to work with Chuck Schumer of New York
on an immigration reform bill, the hard-line Americans for Legal Immigration
punished him by spreading rumors about his private life as loudly as possible.
Graham has been backing away from supporting the immigration bill ever since.

It's harder and harder to cling to the conventional wisdom that the Tea Party
is merely an element in the G.O.P., not the party's controlling force — the
tail that's wagging the snarling dog. It's also hard to maintain that the Tea
Party's nuttier elements are merely a fringe of a fringe. The first national
Tea Party convention, in Nashville in February, chose as its kickoff speaker
the former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a notorious nativist who surely
was enlisted precisely because he runs around saying things like he has "no
idea where Obama was born." The Times/CBS poll of the Tea Party movement found
that only 41 percent of its supporters believe that the president was born in
the United States.

The angry right and its apologists also keep insisting that race has nothing to
do with their political passions. Thus Sarah Palin explained that it's Obama
and the "lamestream media" that are responsible for "perpetuating this myth
that racial profiling is a part" of Arizona's law. So how does that profiling
work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a Republican
Congressman from California and another supporter of the law, rode to the
rescue by suggesting "they will look at the kind of dress you wear." Wise
Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!

In this Alice in Wonderland inversion of reality, it's politically incorrect to
entertain a reasonable suspicion that race may be at least a factor in what
drives an action like the Arizona immigration law. Any racism in America, it
turns out, is directed at whites. Beck called Obama a "racist." Newt Gingrich
called Sonia Sotomayor a "Latina woman racist." When Obama put up a routine
YouTube video calling for the Democratic base to mobilize last week — which he
defined as "young people, African-Americans, Latinos and women" — the
Republican National Committee attacked him for playing the race card.
Presumably the best defense is a good offense when you're a party boasting an
all-white membership in both the House and the Senate and represented by
governors who omit slavery from their proclamations of Confederate History
Month.

In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.'s one
visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message when
appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that African-Americans
"really don't have a reason" to vote Republican, citing his party's pursuit of
a race-baiting "Southern strategy" since the Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was
attacked by conservatives who denied there had ever been such a strategy. That
bit of historical revisionism would require erasing, for starters, Strom
Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped
to propel Bush 41 into the White House in 1988.

The rage of 2010 is far more incendiary than anything that went down in 1988,
and it will soon leap from illegal immigration to other issues in other states.
Boycott the Diamondbacks and Phoenix's convention hotels if you want to punish
Arizona, but don't for a second believe that it will stop the fire next time. 

-+-

We in America do not have government by the majority. We have government by the
majority who participate.
-- Thomas Jefferson (1743 - 1826)

 

... The urge to save humanity is always a false front for the urge to rule.
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