Romney’s Last Chance: The Pete Wilson Option

A very interesting post from www.Vdare.com about Mitt Romney's election problems. This follows this post about libralism and Puritanism. This follows this post about some of the music that was poplular during 2011. This follows THIS POST about some movies that have been released over the past few years that you might have missed! This all follows this post about guidelines to chosing good movies to watch yourself.

Romney’s Last Chance: The Pete Wilson Option




By Peter Bradley
[See also America, Anti-America, And The Role Of VDARE.com and Who Cares About The Hispanic Vote? What About the White a.k.a. American Vote? by Peter Brimelow]

With less than seven weeks to go, President Obama still seems to be holding a small but decisive lead in the presidential race—some 2.7% according to Real Clear Politics’ average of the polls on the morning of September 19. And, even more alarming for the GOP: Obama's near-landslide lead in the Electoral College map, which Real Clear Politics puts at 332-206 for Obama. (RealClearPolitics—2012 Election Maps—Electoral Map No Toss Ups) Click link to see.



It is now clear that the Romney-Ryan strategy of ignoring social issues and campaigning solely on the bad economy is a failure. One recent poll even put the hapless Republican ticket at zero percent among blacks. [Poll: 0 percent of blacks for Mitt Romney, By Mackenzie Weinger, Politico.com, August 22, 2012]

The Obama economic record is indeed poor and the bad news keeps coming: unemployment over 8 percent for 43 straight months, the deficit has reached over 16 trillion, labor force participation is at a 30-year low and $4 gas is here yet again. Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s September 13 announcement of a massive new money-printing program (“QE 3”), obviously risking inflation, is an outright admission of failure (which Romney, curiously, has failed to exploit).

So why aren't independents, working class voters (the old Reagan Democrats from battleground states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan) and others flocking to the Republicans? Perhaps it is because elections are not decided solely on tax and budget issues.

According to a recent Zogby poll, Romney leads Obama among whites by a 52-38 percent margin. But he is actually losing self-identified NASCAR fans (mostly working class whites) by 1 percentage point (44-43 percent). “That’s a number you would never expect to see,” commented pollster John Zogby. [Zogby: Romney Running Worse Than McCain in ‘08, By David A. Patten, Newsmax.com, September 17, 2012]

Because he is not getting the support of these Reagan Democrats, Romney is actually doing worse among whites than John McCain in 2008!

But all is not lost for the GOP—if it has the courage to rally its white base.

Pete Wilson was known as a moderate Republican for most of his career, much like Mitt Romney. As mayor of San Diego and U.S. Senator, Wilson was solidly pro-choice on abortion and tended to ignore social issues. He was best known for supporting tax cuts and balanced budgets (as governor he left California with an impressive $16 billion budget surplus).

Wilson won his first term as California governor in 1990, narrowly defeating Jerry Brown. But early polls showed Wilson facing a 20-point deficit in his bid for reelection in 1994. Around this time, California's Proposition 187, which would have denied most welfare benefits to illegal aliens, was being debated.

The Republican and much of the Conservatism Inc. establishment—notably Jack Kemp and Bill Bennett—joined with the liberals in condemning Prop 187. But Wilson showed true courage in standing up for the citizens of his own state. Despite savage attacks, Wilson became the public face of Prop 187. He was rewarded for his leadership by routing his Democrat opponent, Kathleen Brown, by a 55 to 40 percent margin. He even received 20 percent of the black vote that year—a number that Republican trucklers like McCain and Romney could never dream of reaching.

Wilson would face a similar round of abuse in 1996 when he defended Prop 209, which outlawed racial quotas in California.

These stands made Wilson so popular that he launched a brief bid for the presidency in 1996. But because of throat surgery, he was unable to campaign, or even speak, for a month. His short-lived candidacy never recovered.

It is worth considering what could have happened if Wilson—a socially moderate Republican—had been the public face of opposition to quotas and immigration. Pat Buchanan wound up getting most of the anti-quota and patriotic immigration reform vote in 1996. Unfortunately, Buchanan put these issues on the backburner for most of his campaign to focus on things like free trade, foreign policy and abortion.

Unlike 1994, there are no immigration or Affirmative Action propositions on the ballot that Romney could endorse. Anti-quota and pro-immigration enforcement initiatives are extremely popular and usually pass overwhelmingly. For example, Prop 187 passed in liberal California with 59 percent of vote (63 percent of the white vote). Prop 200 passed in Arizona with 55 percent of the vote (59 percent of the white vote). In 2006, Ward Connerly’s Michigan Civil Rights Initiative passed 58% to 42%, with up to 64 percent of the white vote. A pro-affirmative action site claimed that exit polls showed the “ majority of votes coming from white male conservatives.”

Immigration enforcement remains a very popular issue. Arizona’s Republican Governor Jan Brewer used her support of SB 1070 to cruise to victory in 2010 by a 55-42 percent margin. Before SB 1070, she was behind in the polls—just like Pete Wilson.

Unfortunately, Romney has limited his options with his recent pandering before a group of Hispanic business owners. Addressing the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce on September 17, Romney said, “One million immigrants legally enter America every year—the largest number of any country in the world. I like that," [Romney tells Hispanics he’ll fix the economy and immigration, By Holly Bailey, Yahoo! News, The Ticket, September 17, 2012]

But Romney could still bring up “National Question” issues like Affirmative Action and bilingual education in the debates next month. (Ironically, his opportunistic support for an anti-bilingual education initiative helped elect him Governor of Massachusetts in 2002—a hopeful parallel to Pete Wilson). Romney could still emphasize law enforcement against illegal immigration, maybe by actually mentioning his own party’s quite good platform planks on the issue. He could still denounce Obama’s lawless Administrative Amnesty—and he could announce he that will reverse it, which (incredibly) he has not yet done. He could still bring up ending birthright citizenship, which flared briefly before the 2010 election, getting support from surprising sources like Senator Lindsey Graham, before being suppressed (like all other National Question legislation) by the new Chamber of Commerce-whipped House GOP majority.

And Romney could start slipping these issues into his campaign speeches. The Main Stream Media, which actually believes its Hispanic Hype propaganda or at any rate demands that everyone pay lip-service to it, would have hysterics—which would be very helpful. As the furor over the Pledge of Allegiance in the 1988 Presidential race showed, the Left cannot restrain itself when its visceral issues are touched, even when the overwhelming majority of Americans are on the other side.

Given that this election is expected to be so close, the role of Third Parties becomes especially important. And there is one that does offer red meat on the National Question: The Constitution Party, which has mostly focused on ending abortion, but also has an excellent platform on immigration and quotas. In 2008, its presidential candidate Chuck Baldwin received almost 200,000 votes nationwide. In 2010, Tom Tancredo ran for governor of Colorado on the Constitution ticket and came in second with 37 percent of the vote.

This year, the Constitution Party presidential candidate is former Virginia GOP Congressman Virgil Goode. He is making immigration reform his key issue, actually calling for reduced legal immigration in addition to stopping illegal immigration. Goode also distinguishes himself from Romney and Obama by promising to make English the official language of the United States. (This is actually in the GOP platform, but Goode actually means it)

This stance is working. A July poll had Goode at 9 percent in the swing state (thanks to recent immigration into the DC suburbs) of Virginia. A good deal of this support is probably from Goode’s former constituents in Virginia’s conservative 5th district. Can Romney win Virginia without these votes? [Virginia’s Virgil Goode: Could this Man Cost Mitt Romney the Presidency? By Elizabeth Dias, Time, August 1, 2012]

The Constitution Party is already on the ballot in 25 states including key swing states of Colorado, Ohio, Florida, Iowa, Nevada and Wisconsin. It is still working on getting on the ballot in other states and will run write-in campaigns in states where it is left off.



Even losing one or two percent to Goode is potentially fatal to the GOP.

(Similarly, the Libertarian Party is on the ballot in 47 states. The party is generally pro-immigration but could be a home for disaffected Ron Paul voters—something that Romney’s consultants might have thought of before treating Paul with such contempt at the convention)..

In a 1997 National Review cover story, PDF, Peter Brimelow and Ed Rubenstein warned Republicans about the possibility of third party challenges if the GOP continued to ignore immigration. If Goode turns out to be the Republican Party’s Ralph Nader, it will only have itself to blame.

Pete Wilson showed that standing up for the interests of your base wins elections. A strong stance on National Question issues will win over the Reagan Democrats and stop conservatives from staying home (again) or from voting for the Constitution Party.

If Mitt Romney does not have the courage and brains to follow the example of Pete Wilson, he should start preparing his concession speech.

[VDARE.com Note: For technical reasons internal VDARE.com links in this page will redirect to the appeal as long as it's going on. With your help, we expect it to be over this weekend.]

Peter Bradley (email him) writes from Washington D.C.

Yeah, Yeah, “Attrition Through Enforcement”—But It’s No Substitute For An Immigration Moratorium

An interesting post from www.vdare.com about the the debate on how to deal with immigration . This follows this previous article looking at the newest candidate to head the ICE and this article describing that not a single one of the 30,000 illegal immigrants in El Paso is being deported.. For more interesting stories like this click here to follow this blog.

Yeah, Yeah, “Attrition Through Enforcement”—But It’s No Substitute For An Immigration Moratorium
By Washington Watcher
There are dozens of reasons to oppose mass immigration. But with 14.8 million Americans unemployed as of January and another 10.4 million working part-time involuntarily or too discouraged to look for work, and with President Obama calling jobs the Number One issue, the displacement of American workers by immigrants jumps out.
There are currently eight million illegal aliens in the workforce, and the federal government issues 1.5 million work visas every year. Dealing with these two issues would immediately solve the unemployment problem. The two obvious steps are:
cracking down on illegal immigration while
issuing a moratorium on work visas.
A few Republicans are speaking out about the effect illegal immigration has on workers. But no one in Washington is talking about legal immigration.
Numbers USA along with a few prominent commentators such as Pat Buchanan, Bay Buchanan, and former Congressmen Virgil Goode and Tom Tancredo have called for a moratorium. But there’s barely been a peep inside the beltway.
Rep. Lamar Smith, who has been a leader in the fight against legal and illegal immigration, issued a statement “President Obama could create eight million jobs for citizens and legal workers simply by enforcing immigration laws.” [Obama Ignores Eight-Million 'Stolen' Jobs, December 3, 2009]. Eight million = the illegal alien presence in the workforce.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, the largest patriotic immigration reform organization, which spearheaded earlier moratorium campaigns, has produced numerous press releases bringing up the jobs issue, such as this one after the President’s State of the Union:
“President’s Focus on Putting Americans Back to Work Missing Key Element, Says FAIR: Enforcing Immigration Laws Could Open up 8 Million Jobs.”
But we could just as easily send out a release saying:
“FAIR’s focus on Putting Americans Back to Work Missing Key Element, Says VDARE.COM: A Moratorium on Legal Immigration Could Open Up 1.5 Million Jobs a Year.”
The closest a moratorium has made it to Congress is Roy Beck of Numbers USA’s testimony at a Republican congressional hearing.
Why? I’ve talked to a few Hill Staffers who claim that it is just not “practical” to urge for a moratorium—that we can only do “one thing at a time”.
Bunk! If we can only deal with half of the mass immigration problem, a moratorium is more practical and pressing than cracking down on illegal immigration.
This may seem counterintuitive in an age where intoning “we welcome legal immigrants” has become a standard preface before Republicans and conservative talk show hosts say anything against illegal immigration. But hear me out.
Legal immigration displaces more jobs than illegal immigration. Yes, 8 million is more than 1.5 million, but we are talking about 1.5 million legal immigrants every year. The total foreign born population in the American work force is 23.9 million–just about the same as the total jobless population in the US.
That means there are two legal immigrant workers for every illegal immigrant workers. With a modicum of enforcement and a poor economy, the illegal immigrant population is growing much more slowly than it was a few years ago. Some believe it’s shrinking.
Smith and FAIR both support dealing with immigration through the attrition strategy. But even its own advocates claim attrition would only reduce the illegal alien population by 1.5 million a year. Not all of those illegals will have jobs and CIS estimates that 183,000 of those illegals would leave anyway. So a legal immigration moratorium will save more jobs total per year, and in the long run, than attrition.
Furthermore, though it becomes harder to deal with the illegal population the longer they stay, we can still legally send them home without a huge deal of red tape unless they get amnesty. However, of the 1.5 million visas we issue each year, over half are permanent work visas. And it is still easier for a legal temporary worker to get permanent residency than an illegal alien.
A moratorium on legal immigration is also a much simpler task to undertake.
To underscore the simplicity of cutting down legal immigration, I will make a confession: removing the illegal alien population from the United States, whether by attrition and/or mass deportations cannot happen overnight, won’t be free, and will lend itself to plenty of politically costly sob stories.
As I say, “Attrition Through Enforcement” has become the preferred method for Congressional Republicans and Beltway immigration patriots to deal with illegal immigration. It entails reducing welfare for illegal aliens, increasing cooperation with state law enforcement officials in deporting illegal aliens who commit other crimes, and keeping illegals out of the workforce through mandatory E-Verify.
This is a good start. But not every single illegal alien has a job, is on welfare, or commits additional crimes. Many illegal aliens will try to work under the table, while others will just become a public burden. Emergency rooms and public schools are the most costly government services used by illegal aliens, and they are currently off limits because of the courts.
According to the Center for Immigration Studies—which more or less invented the attrition strategy—a fully implemented attrition agenda would reduce the illegal population by 1.5 million annually at a cost of 400 million dollars a year. [Attrition Through Enforcement, April 2006]. Depending on what estimate of the illegal population you accept, this will cost between $3.2 to 6 billion over eight to 15 years.
If we want to get rid of the population faster, attrition needs to be coupled with large scale deportations. Without a single politician supporting mass deportations (that’s another story), it’s a safe bet we won’t be able to repeat Operation Wetback, where we send illegals straight back to Mexico on buses. Nor will we be able to use “racial profiling”, although it would be entirely reasonable.
It will take some serious law enforcement costs to locate the illegal aliens. Then they will be held in detention facilities, and there will be legal costs for the deportation procedures.
Finally, I will also be the first to admit that some illegal immigrants are perfectly nice people, were brought here by their parents as young children, have roots in the community, and/or have young US Citizen children. Any successful removal of illegal aliens will be replete with sob stories about these hardships that will demoralize many erstwhile opponents of illegal immigration.
Don’t get me wrong—I absolutely support an attrition-plus-deportation policy. The cost would be about as much as a few weeks in Iraq and Afghanistan and less than 1 percent of Obama’s stimulus bill.
And of course, the price of enforcement is paid back several times over by the money saved on government services. For every sob story of a honor roll anchor baby whose mother was deported, there are a dozens of unreported stories of victims of illegal alien crime, people whose schools and neighborhoods were destroyed, or jobs were undercut by illegal aliens.
The benefits of dealing with illegal immigration greatly outweigh the costs. But there’s no denying that there are some costs.
In contrast, an immigration moratorium will not cost a dime. All it requires is a swipe of a pen that changes a law.
Nor will it be the source for any sob stories, because we are not dealing with any actual separated families or honor students, not to mention the fact that reporters are too poor and lazy to go out of the country to find some imaginary immigrant who dreams of saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
I’ve heard “You can’t deport X million illegal aliens” ad nauseam. Wrong, of course.
But immigration enthusiasts can’t say “You can’t change visa levels.”
Well, actually they can, of course. Immigration enthusiasts are capable of anything. But they would be even more obviously wrong than usual.

"Washington Watcher" [email him] is an anonymous source Inside The Beltway.

Legal Immigrants and "Anchor Babies" Weigh Down Obamacare

A very interesting article from www.townhall.com! I am glad to see one of their contributors referencing www.vdare.com. For more on this see http://brianleesblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/while-america-sleeps-how-islam.html and http://brianleesblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/read-my-lips-no-new-amnesty.html

Legal Immigrants and "Anchor Babies" Weigh Down Obamacare
by Virgil Goode

Like virtually every issue that faces the nation, our healthcare problem is greatly exacerbated by mass immigration—both legal and illegal. A total of 43% of non-citizens lack health insurance, compared to just 12.7% of native-born Americans. These uninsured immigrants impose huge strains on our healthcare system that helped create the crisis we currently face.
Plenty of analysts and commentators have exposed how illegal aliens will receive healthcare under Obamacare. They point out that while the bill claims to prohibit illegal aliens from receiving benefits, the Democrats repeatedly blocked Amendments that would screen for legal status. Steve Camorata of the non-partisan Center for Immigration Studies recently estimated that 6.6 million illegal aliens will be eligible for public healthcare.

This is an outrage for hardworking American Citizens, but I’d like to focus on two other important but largely ignored aspects of our immigration crisis that will cost taxpayers billions of dollars if Obama’s healthcare boondoggle is passed.

The first is birthright citizenship. The 14th Amendment of the Constitution states,
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.
The Amendment was passed for the sole purpose of granting freed slaves and their children citizenship. Senator Jacob Merritt Howard of Michigan who introduced the Amendment stated,

This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States.

But the obvious intent, as well as the “subject to jurisdiction thereof” clause, is ignored by federal policy that gives children of illegal aliens born in the United States automatic citizenship.
What does this have to do with the healthcare debate? Under the plan right now, only one family member needs to be eligible for government healthcare, then the whole family can get free healthcare.
The Congressional Research Service acknowledged,
There could be instances where some family members would meet the definition of an eligible individual for purposes of the credit, while other family members would not… H.R. 3200 does not expressly address how such a situation would be treated. Therefore, it appears that the Health Choices Commissioner would be responsible for determining how the credits would be administered in the case of mixed-status families.”
This means that if a family of illegal aliens sneaks into the country and then they have one child after they come in, the US Citizen “anchor baby” could make the entire family eligible for tax funded healthcare. And I don’t need to tell you how Obama’s handpicked “Health Czar” would come down on the issue.
Another problem that makes the healthcare bill problematic is our policy of legal immigration. Annually, America accepts approximately one million legal immigrants in addition to the flood of illegal aliens. Most of these immigrants come through the process of chain migration, whereby legal immigrants and US Citizens sponsor family members. The process spirals out of control where eventually everyone’s cousin is eligible, regardless of skills or what they contribute to this country.
Steve Camarota analyzed the effect of all immigrants, both legal and illegal, as well as their US Born children on health insurance. Camarota found that this group comprises up to one third of all the uninsured in America. Compared to the native born population, they are twice as likely to be uninsured, and twice as likely to be on Medicaid.
In an attempt to partially alleviate the burden chain migration places on social services, the 1996 Welfare Reform Act made some requirements that the sponsors of immigrants be financially responsible for the immigrants. Indeed most welfare programs have some limitations on non-citizens. But under HR 3200, new immigrants who are supposed to be supported by a sponsor can get tax funded healthcare. They can even sponsor more immigrants!

Writing at the immigration website www.VDARE.com, former Hudson Institute economist Ed Rubenstein estimates that legal immigrants and their children will be responsible for 78% of all increased healthcare costs by 2050 totaling 1.2 trillion dollars.
Unlike illegal aliens, anchor babies and legal immigrants did not break any laws. We should not demonize them, but we should not ignore the huge fiscal burden they impose on our already stretched economy.
Fixing our broken healthcare system is not easy, but making some basic changes to our immigration policy is. Securing our borders, enforcing our laws, ending birthright citizenship and chain migration, and reducing our levels of legal immigration; would do much more to lower healthcare costs than any government program.
Before America embarks on healthcare reform, we should either fix these problems in our immigration system, or at least put adequate safeguards to prevent immigrants from receiving even more free benefits at the expense of the US taxpayer.