Call it a case of right message, wrong messenger.
Attacked by Mitt Romney for his lax record on illegal immigration as mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani returned fire on Wednesday, charging that as Governor of Massachusetts, Mr. Romney “did very little about (immigration) until the last day or two he was in office—and it never had any impact.”
Rudy is absolutely correct.
Granted, the former mayor is the last person who should be advancing this argument. He’s playing the same disingenuous game that Mr. Romney is: pretending that his commitment to an immigration crackdown is anything other than an opportunistic ploy born of the political imperatives that come with running as a Republican in 2008.
But it’s Mr. Romney’s hypocrisy on this subject that is particularly telling, because it fits seamlessly with the camouflaging he’s done on practically every issue of consequence to the G.O.P. electorate. He has campaigned in 2007 as the conservative’s conservative, but he showed absolutely no interest in building such a record in Massachusetts when he had the opportunity.
Immigration is a perfect example. To a G.O.P. base that cares passionately about this issue, Mr. Romney offers himself as a courageous breath of fresh air from Ted Kennedy’s backyard, doing God’s work in a liberal state where most politicians would happily declare all 352 cities and towns immigrant sanctuaries if they could.
"As Governor,” Mr. Romney brags in a new ad, “I authorized the State Police to enforce immigration laws. I opposed driver’s licenses and in-state tuition for illegal aliens.”
To the average caucus-goer, this surely sounds convincing coming from Mitt Romney, with his confident charm and impeccable delivery. It also helps that the average caucus-goer wasn’t paying much attention to Massachusetts in 2003, 2004, 2005, and most of 2006.
Consider the centerpiece of his I-got-tough-on-illegals boast: his move to use the State Police to enforce immigration laws.
He launched the initiative in the middle of 2006—with just months remaining on his term and well into a lame-duck period that had begun the year before—when it became clear how important the issue would be in the G.O.P. presidential primary. He finally received the necessary clearance from the federal government in December, in his administration’s final days, and then issued (and loudly trumpeted) an executive order—even though the Governor-elect, a Democrat whose landslide win was partly attributable to irate voters who felt Mr. Romney quit on his job in order to run for President, had made it clear that he would immediately rescind the order upon taking office.
On the State Police issue, Mr. Giuliani’s critique is squarely on point: Mr. Romney’s order, which would have required several months of training for a select few state troopers before it could be implemented, never went into effect.
It was, of course, all for show—for an audience in Iowa and South Carolina, and not in Massachusetts. What Mr. Romney sought to do was actually rather complicated, given the questions of which state troops would be selected to enforce immigration laws, how they would be trained (and at what cost), and how the program might effect existing relationships between the police and illegal immigrants who were willing to provide information that might prevent crimes. But he pursued it in a sloppy, last-minute fashion that made it only too easy for his successor to scrap the whole plan without paying a political price.
In truth, Mr. Romney actually was in prime position as Governor to create a lasting State Police immigration enforcement program—and to address immigration on a variety of other fronts. Polls in Massachusetts showed voters opposing an effort to provide in-state tuition for the children of illegal immigrants by a two-to-one margin. The numbers for issuing driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants were even worse. In other words, the political climate in the state, as liberal as it supposedly is, was ripe for a politician to come along and press exactly the buttons Mr. Romney is now pressing in his presidential campaign. The Democrats who dominate the Massachusetts Legislature would have had to work with him had he made immigration a priority.
Of course, he never even tried to do this. Mr. Romney was silent on the subject in 2003, 2004 and—except for expressing opposition (along with numerous Democrats and the clear majority of the public) to the in-state tuition proposal—2005. It was only in 2006, when he was spending more time outside of the state than inside it, that he discovered his life-long opposition to illegal immigration.
Now, he wants Republicans to believe he’s Tom Tancredo with electability. And he’s not afraid to rub it in his foes’ faces. The Z-Visa John McCain was pushing as part of his immigration reform plan, Mr. Romney seethed earlier this year, should be renamed an “A-Visa—because it’s amnesty, and that’s what it stands for.” That surely went over well in Iowa, where Mr. Romney leads the G.O.P. pack—and where he’s now using immigration to take aim at Mike Huckabee, who has stormed into a strong second place in the state. It’s also a far cry from what he was saying before he discovered his current position.
In November 2005, for instance, Mitt was asked about the topic by the Boston Globe and volunteered that Mr. McCain’s immigration ideas were “very different from amnesty, where you literally say, ‘OK, everybody here gets to stay.’ It’s saying you could work your way into becoming a legal resident of the country by working here without taking benefits and then applying and then paying a fine.”
In 2004, Republicans rallied against a Massachusetts politician who was for something before he was against it. Mitt Romney will have to hope that the second time’s the charm.
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