The GOP CNN / Heritage / AEI debate in Washington DC
No sense beating around the bush: The focus for most was on Newt Gingrich last night, since his emergence as the current most-credible-anti-Mitt-Romney, or even, in some polls, the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination. My view is that he did very well, and was especially wise to stick to his style of not taking shots at the other GOP candidates.
The controversy coming out of this debate appears to center around Gingrich’s comments on immigration. Like everyone else, he’s in favor of controlling the border. After that, he favors a calibrated way of dealing with illegal immigrants who are already here, based on their length of time here and depth of ties. From the transcript:
If you’re here — if you’ve come here recently, you have no ties to this country, you ought to go home, period. If you’ve been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you’ve been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don’t think we’re going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully and kick you out.
The [Krieble] Foundation has a very good red card program that says you get to be legal, but you don’t get a pass to citizenship. And so there’s a way to ultimately end up with a country where there’s no more illegality, but you haven’t automatically given amnesty to anyone.
Later, as part of his response to Michele Bachmann’s fairly predictable attack insinuating that Gingrich wanted to give amnesty to all 11 million illegals, he also said this:
I do suggest if you go back to your district, and you find people who have been here 25 years and have two generations of family and have been paying taxes and are in a local church, as somebody who believes strongly in family, you’ll have a hard time explaining why that particular subset is being broken up and forced to leave, given the fact that they’ve been law-abiding citizens for 25 years.
It’s worth noting that he got strong applause for that answer.
I would contrast Newt’s handling of this issue with Rick Perry’s. They are probably on much the same page on the overall topic of immigration, but Gingrich just plain communicates in a far superior manner. As with his answers to questions in general during these debates, he very quickly not only states his position but makes the case for it. As I indicated a little way’s back in time, this race has now come down for me, for all practical purposes, to Perry or Gingrich. Gingrich’s ability to express himself and also to persuade with his arguments is a plus that cannot be put aside. That particular talent has to be especially highly valued this time around, considering the eight years we went through with the last Republican president. I hold George W. Bush in very high esteem on a number of levels, but it was also painful, as a supporter of his, to have to watch him on TV and try to telepathically will him to make better arguments for his policies. Newt will never need that kind of psychic help, even if it worked (which it rarely did for Dubya). Perry, I’m afraid …
Now, Mitt Romney has mostly tried to cut the figure of the reasonable candidate of moderation during this campaign. This explains why someone like Peggy Noonan sleeps beneath 20 x 30 poster of him, and has taken on the job of shilling for his candidacy—if ever so surreptitiously— in her weekly columns. Yet, illegal immigration is one issue on which he’s seen the advantage of pandering to what he probably sees as the fever-filled base. It’s one issue that has given him an in to try to get to the right (politically) of Rick Perry, and no doubt he will do the same as regards his latest threat: Newt Gingrich. Indeed, he began to do it last night.
I think that those voters who see this issue as so paramount ought to ask themselves whether they prefer a candidate who knows exactly what to say to please them—while having a record that shows he cannot be relied upon to stick to anything that he says—or whether they prefer a candidate who is willing to risk their ire, by not being absolutist on illegal immigrants, but can far more be counted upon to keep his promises and actually achieve something that goes in the right direction.
There are some who believe today that Newt Gingrich is finished, because of his “softness” on illegal immigration. I do not—because, as I said, he’s making the case for his position very well—but certainly I could be wrong. If this is indeed a litmus-test issue that destroys any candidate who doesn’t tow the absolutist “throw-em-all-out-now-regardless” line, then I think that’s a disastrous development. There are so many more important issues on which to judge these candidates, what with our economy continuing to crater and the world getting more dangerous by the day, and to pick somebody substandard just because they know how to parrot the right line about illegals would be stupidity squared.
Not all conservatives believe all the same things on every issue, obviously, but all in all I think I’m pretty darned conservative, politically, in the context of America today. I’m 100% pro-life, and that is a litmus-test issue for me. I am in favor of digging up the entire Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and connecting a big hose from there to every gas station in the lower 48. I’m in favor of lowering taxes on the rich. And so on. But if this question of absolutism on illegal immigration is the deciding one in the Republican presidential primaries, I honestly am not going to know where to go, politically. I like candidates who come across with some semblance of honesty, and I believe that those who are pandering to the absolutists on this issue are simply not being honest about how they would handle the subject while in office.
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We shall see what happens. On the basis of his performance last night, relative to the other candidates, Newt Gingrich should only have been strengthened. No one else, it seems to me, made any particular ripples in their own favor.
Gingrich is many things, and he’s not perfect, but there’s no doubt that he would strive to be a truly transformative president were he elected in November of 2012. After the four years of transformation in the wrong direction that we’ve gotten under Barack Obama, I think more and more conservatives are thinking that maybe they’d like to take a gamble after all with Newt’s brand of visionary leadership. The next few weeks will be huge ones for his candidacy. So far, I would say he’s handling the hot seat pretty well. But the heat is definitely on.
