I love it when cartoonists include commentary with their comics. I was sad when Ed Stein stopped drawing editorial cartoons with commentary, but now it looks like David Horsey is taking up the slack.
Horsey has an interesting take on Obama’s thrust on immigration, and how the Republicans are being a bit weak on the parry. They have to have some reason to oppose everything Obama does, but so far they are using the fairly lame excuse that they don’t like the way Obama did an end run around Congress. Even though doing an end run around a Congress that has done absolutely nothing about immigration surprised nobody. So why is the GOP having problems with this? Horsey says:
But it may be that the real reason the Romney campaign and Republican congressional leaders are bugged by Obama’s switcheroo on immigration enforcement is that it is an ingenious political move for which they lack a coherent response.
The big problem is that the GOP base is violently anti-immigrant (at least against Latino immigrants). During the Republican primary, Romney had to promise that he would veto the DREAM act, and take a far-right hard line against illegal immigration.
On the other hand, most independent voters — the ones Romney now has to court in order to get elected — overwhelmingly approve of Obama’s move. So Romney has a difficult choice: piss off the base, or piss off the people he needs to get elected. If Romney follows his inner Etch-A-Sketch, my guess is that he will choose to do a full flip-flop and embrace immigration reform. He just has to figure out a way to do this and piss off the base as little as possible.
And I think he can pull it off. All he needs to do is to pick Marco Rubio as his VP. Rubio already made the first move. Now it is up to Romney.
What do you think?
