From the invaluable (but only $3.95 a month) OpinionJournal Political Diary: First, Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. describes the job of American forces in Iraq:
That job is to be the biggest, baddest force in the country, ready and able to drop the hammer on any group that tries to get power by any path other than the ballot box. Notice how utterly this situation differs from the Korean war analogy now on every lip. The rest of the job is for Iraqis. They’re the ones who have to figure out how to live with each other. It may take five years. It may take 15. We could afford to have a more relaxed attitude about this (albeit continuously learning how to minimize the cost of this mission to our troops and taxpayers). And let’s be realistic: It will be useful for American interests to have a sizeable, battle-hardened force in the region, increasingly savvy and subtle in local ways, for the foreseeable future.
If the Democrats’ control of Congress makes it impossible to press ahead with more vigor against the mufsidun troubling Iraq, the role outlined by Mr. Jenkins has the virtue of not handing bragging rights to the enemy.
Second, John Fund on the political consequences of creating an immigration “crisis” out of a third rate irritant:
This summer, as polls showed GOP House incumbents increasingly in trouble, the talk in closed-door meetings of GOP members was that the party needed to use opposition to illegal immigration to deflect voter anger on other issues. “The issue is a magic carpet to victory for us,” was the memorable way one anti-immigration member put it. Later that same month, the House GOP pushed through a bill that authorized the building of a massive border fence without adding a sensible guest-worker program to provide a legal means for needed workers to enter the country.
Well, the returns are in and the strategy was a clear failure. GOP candidates who ran almost exclusively on the immigration issue lost in districts that President Bush easily carried in 2004. The most surprising loser was Rep. J.D. Hayworth of Arizona, who wrote a book on immigration called Whatever It Takes and yet managed to lose a district Mr. Bush won with 54% of the vote two years ago. Another Arizona GOP candidate, former state legislator Randy Graf, did ride the immigration issue to a plurality win in the GOP primary only to lose badly in a Tucson district last night that Mr. Bush had won with 53%.
The biggest bellyflop on the immigration issue came in Indiana, where Rep. John Hostettler, the hardline chairman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, lost by a stunning 22 points in a district that gave John Kerry only 38% of its votes just two years ago. “Immigration has never been an issue that brings people to the polls in single-minded desire to vote on that one issue,” says political analyst Michael Barone, co-author of the Almanac of American Politics. “Voters end up having other concerns, and anti-illegal immigration polling numbers are more often than not political fools’ gold.”
Even if the gold were 24-carat, the ability to spend it wouldn’t be limited to Republicans. The essential element of an effective “enforcement only” strategy, as restrictionists are quite willing to say, is punishing companies that hire illegal aliens. Most of those are small businessmen. Don’t you think that Democrats can find their way to pushing measures that will do the most harm to a natural Republican constituency?
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