Posted by
Cary Wesberry on Monday, March 17, 2008 11:25:04 PM
Aside the most obvious case -- his own -- John McCain cited two recent examples of GOP candidates taking a hard-line on immigration to no avail (And note the elbow thrown at a certain former colleague who came after McCain in the primary).
My colleague Josh Kraushaar writes up McCain's comments:
On NPR’s “Morning Edition” today, John McCain suggested that strong anti-immigrant rhetoric contributed to two recent, high-profile GOP Congressional losses – of former Pennsylvania senator Rick Santorum, who badly lost to Sen. Bob Casey in 2006, and Jim Oberweis, who lost the heavily Republican seat of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert this month in a special election.
"I know that there have been some races, like here in Pennsylvania, where Senator Santorum emphasized that issue [immigration] and lost by a large number,” McCain said on NPR.
“We just had a loss of Denny Hastert's seat out in Illinois. The Republican candidate out there, I am told, had very strong anti-immigrant rhetoric also, so I would hope that many of our Republican candidates would understand the political practicalities of this issue.”
McCain campaigned for Oberweis last month, helping the campaign raise about $257,000. Oberweis will be on the ballot again in November, against Rep. Bill Foster (D-Ill.)
During the campaign, Oberweis proposed his own plan to crack down on illegal immigration, and aired a television ad arguing that politicians in Washington "can't seem to fix" the problem.
McCain’s advice is going against the strategy of a handful of leading Republican Congressional candidates. Just today, one of the Republicans’ top Congressional recruits, Hazleton mayor Lou Barletta, invited all three presidential candidates “to come to our great city to discuss the issue of illegal immigration in the United States.”
Barletta, who is running against Rep. Paul Kanjorski (D-Pa.), has built a national political following over his strident opposition to illegal immigration and the punitive measures that he took as mayor to curb it.
John McCain just doesn't know when to stop digging his own grave. I see McCain takes no note of the Democrat winners who were using their own anti-illegal immigration campaigns to win elections. The actual citizens of this country want border security and illegal immigration to cease as much as humanly possible. Two very simple truth John McCain refuses to accept. The cranky old fool will go down losing with no conservative base before he admits he was wrong on illegal immigration and takes any kind of action. This is exactly the sort of moderation conservatives typically want no part of. If they did, they wouldn't call themselves "conservative". Instead they would just be regular Republicans, which to most of us is like saying you're a Democrat.
How is that anti-illegal immigration is a losing issue with the people when both Arizona and Oklahoma have passed laws to seriously crack-down on illegals? So much so in fact that illegals are engaging in mass exodus from both of those states. Answer: John McCain is a lying politician first and foremost, and he will be for the rest of his life.