National Journal’s Josh Kraushaar has a strong analysis of why Rick Perry may be President Obama’s worst nightmare. One point is worth highlighting — Perry’s stance on immigration:
“The other major asset that Perry brings to the table in a general election is immigration. The Republican nominee’s ability to connect with Hispanic voters, concentrated in battleground states like Nevada, Colorado, and Florida, is critical to winning the White House in 2012 and beyond. Perry brings a track record of Hispanic outreach in Texas, and he carried 38 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2010 against Democrat Bill White, in line with George W. Bush’s performance as governor.
More notably, while campaigning to win the conservative Republican base, he has carefully avoided the strident anti-immigration rhetoric that often characterizes the party’s loudest voices. He came out against a border fence—virtual heresy among elements of the right—and didn’t back down from his support of allowing illegal immigrants to receive in-state tuition in his state. Perry’s team is playing long ball, and it recognizes the importance of the Hispanic vote and his unique ability to win enough of them over.”
Kraushaar may be correct in terms of a head-to-head match-up between Perry and Obama, but what about getting the GOP nomination in the first place?
Just yesterday, Mikey Kaus was sounding the warning bell about Perry how bad he is on immigration:
“It’s not just that he doesn’t want to build the border fence. Many fence opponents argue (though I disagree) that it’s far more important to take away the “jobs magnet” that lures illegals to try to cross the border in the first place. But Perry hasn’t supported the quickest, best way to take away the jobs magnet, which is to require all private employers to use the “E-Verify” electronic check of Social Security numbers. Perry wouldn’t even require his own state government to use E-Verify, let alone private employers, declaring “E-Verify would not make a hill of beans’ difference when it comes to what’s happening in America today.” ….
And the fence and E-Verify are the easy part of this issue. They are the “stripped down basic package” of enforcement provisions outlined by immigration-control advocate Mark Krikorian. The hard part is getting a candidate–especially a pro-business GOP candidate–to promise, in a binding way, that in the future he or she won’t, under pressure from business and Latino leaders, accept some sort of premature legalization (i.e., amnesty).”
If Perry is taking the long view of this campaign and aiming straight for Hispanic voters, why should any enforcement-first, Republican voter believe a President Perry wouldn’t go for amnesty to keep Hispanic voters happy?
One more question: How would candidate Perry lure Sen. Marco Rubio to be his running mate, a possibility that makes lots of GOP pundits all warm and fuzzy, if Perry is running on a “realistic” (read: pro-illegal immigrant) immigration platform? Especially when “Rubio [has] hardened his opposition to the DREAM Act and continues to repeat the harsh rhetoric of the right wing, dismissing anything other than border and workplace enforcement as “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.”
UPDATE: Is Karl Rove for or against Perry and does the latino vote matter? By looks of his interview with “Good Morning America” when he charaterized Perry’s views on Social Security as “toxic”, it might seem like Rove isn’t a big Perry fan. But a closer look at another point he emphasized and Rove’s position is less clear.
When asked about the general election and whether the GOP nominee was a lock to beat a weak and disliked incumbent, Rove said, in essence, not so fast.
Republicans “can blow it,” Rove said, by “having a candidate who could not appeal to the swing voters in this election who are conservative minded independents, latinos and white working class voters…The primary has to be a process by which our candidate is strengthened not weakened and emerges from the end of it ready to conduct a general election campaign for the voters who are up for grabs in this election.”
Of the two major candidates — Romney and Perry – there is no discussion about who can attract more Latino voters: It’s Perry. Perhaps Rove is trying to signal to the Perry camp that if they’d just clean up their rhetoric about Social Security everything else would be hunky dory for a general election victory.