In a Friday post, Mother Jones blogger Kevin Drum, analyzing President Obama’s just-announced immigration action with an eye toward the next few elections, pronounced it “pretty brilliant,” with a “minimal” downside and a “potentially huge” upside.
That upside, Drum remarked, might well ensue now that Obama has “waved a red flag in front of congressional tea partiers, turning them into frothing lunatics who want to shut down the government and maybe even impeach him…And it's likely to turn next year's [sic] primary season into an anti-Hispanic free-for-all that does permanent damage to the GOP brand.”
As for whether Obama’s action constituted executive overreach, Drum opined that it’s a big deal only to “the Fox News set that's already convinced Obama is a tyrant,” and that outside right-wing circles the matter “will be forgotten in a few weeks.”
From Drum’s post (emphasis added):
There are questions about whether President Obama's immigration plan is legal. There are questions about whether it's good policy. And then there are questions about whether it's smart politics. On the latter point, I'd say that Obama has been unusually shrewd…
…[Rep. Steve King of Iowa is] going to become the de facto leader of the anti-immigration forces. In the same way that Republican candidates all have to kiss Sheldon Adelson's ring and swear eternal loyalty to Israel if they want access to his billions, they're going to have to kiss King's ring and swear eternal hostility to any kind of immigration from south of the border—and they're going to compete wildly to express this in the most colorful ways possible. And that's a big problem...[E]ffectively denouncing the entire Hispanic population of the United States is going to steadily destroy any hopes Republicans have of ever appealing to this fast-growing voting bloc.
And that's not all. Republican leaders are not only fearful of next year's primaries branding the GOP forever as a bunch of xenophobic maniacs, they're afraid it's going to wipe out any chance they have over the next two years of demonstrating to voters that they're a party of adults...
…I think Obama deserves credit for an unusually brilliant political move here. Some of this is accidental: he would have announced his immigration plan earlier in the year if he hadn't gotten pushback from red-state Democratic senators who didn't want to deal with this during tough election battles. Still, he stuck to his guns after the midterm losses, and the result seems to be almost an unalloyed positive for his party.
The downside, after all, is minimal: the public says it's mildly unhappy with Obama using an executive order to change immigration rules. But that's a nothingburger. Outside of the Fox News set that's already convinced Obama is a tyrant bent on shredding the Constitution, this simply isn't something that resonates very strongly or for very long. It will be forgotten in a few weeks.
The upside, conversely, is potentially huge. Obama has, indeed, waved a red flag in front of congressional tea partiers, turning them into frothing lunatics who want to shut down the government and maybe even impeach him…And it's likely to turn next year's primary season into an anti-Hispanic free-for-all that does permanent damage to the GOP brand.
And that's not even counting the energizing effect this has on Democrats, as well as the benefit they get from keeping a promise to Hispanics and earning their loyalty for the next few election cycles...
So: the whole thing is politically pretty brilliant. It unifies Democrats; wrecks the Republican agenda in Congress; cements the loyalty of Hispanics; and presents the American public with a year of Republican candidates spitting xenophobic fury during primary season. If you're President Obama, what's not to like?
