Perry: On Second Thought (Or First?), I Shouldn't Have Said You Were Heartless

Missing the point:

“I was probably a bit over-passionate by using that word and it was inappropriate,” Perry admitted. “In Texas in 2001 we had 181 members of the legislature – only four voted against this piece of legislation – because it wasn’t about immigration it was about education.”

There are several problems here, which Perry doesn't seem to get.

It wasn't just the Lindsey-Graham-style appeal to liberal emo-politics. That was bad, absolutely. In fact, that is in fact probably the worst part of it.

But there are several other bad parts.

First, by noting he was "overpassionate" about it, he indicates that his emotion, and his conviction based on that emotion, is on the wrong side of the Republican Party mainstream here.

As we saw with Bush and amnesty, it is a problem when a politician emotionally, in his bones, feels he is doing the right thing. At least, it's a problem when that "feeling" is repudiated by the majority of the party.

There is no reasoning someone out of a position he wasn't reasoned into in the first place, the saying goes, and it's a keeper.

The other problem is that, combined with his rejection of a full-border-fence (which actually doesn't make a great deal of sense from a practical point of view) and his rejection of E-Verify (most states actually do reject E-Verify), he's got the reputation, now set fairly solidly, of an immigration squish, something the Lindsey Graham appeal to emotion only sets and hardens further.

And the party is not squish on illegal immigration.

Eventually he gets around to the only answer that can save him...

“We wouldn’t be having these conversations today, whether it’s about in-state tuition for illegal immigrants or whether it’s the Arizona law or whether it’s voter-ID which we passed in Texas, or sanctuary cities and the banning of those… None of those would come up if the federal government had simply done its job through the years to secure our borders.”

...but that really should have been his answer from the start: The federal government, not me, has created and encouraged an impossible situation for governors to deal with; I dealt with the difficulties of this non-policy as governor, making the best of a bad situation; but no, what I would do as President would not be the same thing I had to do as governor who is prisoner to a policy of insecure borders foisted on the states from DC.

And as for those children of illegals here -- as the government is not requiring them to vacate, I was just attempting to deal with the facts on the ground such as they are.

That would have minimized the damage here, at least.

But by affirmatively doubling down on this, and in such an emotional (that is, incapable-of-being moved) way...

Well. We are where we are.

I don't know how he entered this primary without realizing the party's mainstream is strongly immigration-enforcement, and that he'd have to adapt to that reality.

On a Meta-Level... I am really getting sick to death of this party becoming the Party of Feelings.

Thinking has almost become a dirty word. It's all about convictions (emotional) and values (not emotional per se, but pre-rational).

Those things do have a very big place in the scheme of things.

But the idea that we can just "intuit" everything like goddamned Emo Jedis... I'm really getting tired of it.

We seem determined to replicate the worst parts of liberalism.

Governor Perry In The Comments Section! I'm honored.

Look at the big picture. Once we get 'em into the colleges, we inject 'em all with Gardisil. Texas winds up with the lowest cost of landscape maintenance in the entire country.

posted by Ace at 03:19 PM

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