Rick’s no apologies, what you see is what you get image, of which he is obviously very proud, seems tailor-made for taking on chameleon Mitt Romney, who’s never met a position he couldn’t take.* But the Republican pack has found Perry’s weakness: he loves Mexicans! Hell, he’s practically queer for them!
Perry’s problem is that down in Texas businessmen see Texas and Mexico as a single economic unit. There is no “they” on the other side of the Rio Grande. It’s all “us.” Rick was even in favor of the “Trans-Texas Express,” Ron Paul’s nightmare, a north-south super highway running from Mexico to the U.S. heartland, a drainpipe of jobs sending hordes of drug-crazed Mexican truckers raping and pillaging across the land.
Well, Rick had to back off of that one, but he hasn’t backed off an inch from his in-state college tuition rates for children of illegal immigrants, which provokes semi-hysteria among the Tea Party crew. They hate Rick’s “there is no ‘they’” thinking. The Tea Party needs a “they,” an enemy, someone or something that can be made to suffer. Sure, Rick’s executed 234 folks, and that ain’t bad. But when the Tea Party’s hungry for blood, ain’t bad ain’t good enough.
Afterwords
Over at the American Conservative, Ron Unz has a long piece on immigration and politics, noting that in 1994, California Governor Pete Wilson, scrambling for a hot button issue, came up with a campaign strategy that tarred the Democratic Party as the party of illegal immigration. It worked, for one election. Thereafter, embittered Hispanics flocked to the Democratic Party, and California switched from being a Republican stronghold to a Democratic one, and the Republican Party’s long-cherished “mortal lock” on the Presidency dissolved. Which suggests that we are as a nation where California was in 1994.†
*No wonder he loves gay rights!
†Unz’s piece is well worth reading, until the end, when he goes flying wildly off the rails with a “plan” to get rid of all those damn foreigners and restore white-bread, middle-class America, this to be achieved by raising the minimum wage to around $12 an hour, the idea being, apparently, that no one would hire a Mexican at $12 an hour. “Very stiff penalties, including mandatory prison terms, could assure near absolute compliance,” Unz assures us, demonstrating that he knows very little about how the American judicial system operates. Unz tells us that this plan is “impressionistic and plausible rather than based on any sort of rigorous and detailed research.” Except for the “plausible” part, I’d agree with him.
