Bush's immigration problem

See, however much I dislike Bush, I must admit that I don't regard him as evil incarnate. In his heart, he's probably a lot like his father: sensible, pragmatic, and fairly moderate. His extremism, such as there is any, lies in his rabidly pro-business approach to the economy. The problem is that as president he seems to have been pushed to the right by 9/11 and the escalation of the war on terror, by highly influential figures in his own administration, such as Cheney and the neocon foreign policy cabal, and by a conservative movement that has grown more and more extreme and that has largely taken over the Republican Party.

Consider illegal immigration: "President Bush generally favors plans to give millions of illegal immigrants a chance at U.S. citizenship without leaving the country, but does not want to be more publicly supportive because of opposition among conservative House Republicans, according to senators who attended a recent White House meeting."

This is one issue where Bush clearly finds himself at odds with hard-line conservatives, be they in Congress, the base, or the blogosphere. As I put it at the One America Committee last month, "Bush faces challenges from anti-immigration radicals within his own party, the xenophobic nationalist wing of the GOP". I don't necessarily support the guest-worker solution that he and others have floated, but there are intelligent, compassionate voices on both sides of the aisle, Democrats and Republicans alike, responsible officials who are working to find a solution.

It doesn't surprise me that Bush personally favours a plan that would ultimately provide citizenship to illegal immigrants. But what political capital does he have left? He may yet try to work for a bipartisan solution, but he knows that his legacy is very much tied up with the fortunes of Congressional Republicans, with their successes and failures in this November's midterms. And that means that he'll likely continue to pander to the xenophobic nationalists even as his heart tells him otherwise.

Oh, you think I'm setting up conservative straw men? Consider what these key figures of the conservative blogosphere have had to say in response to this:

Captain Ed: "We knew that Bush has always been more of an open-borders politician than any true conservative on immigration. Most of us hoped to get the border fence and truly credible security on the southern border as a minimum once he came to office, and figured we would have to give way on some sort of compromise on the status of those already in the country as a trade-off.

Michelle Malkin goes even further. She calls this "a White House betrayal".

This is what Bush has to contend with. It's Morrissey and Malkin, but it's also Tancredo and Sensenbrenner and Frist, not to mention millions and millions out in the Republican heartland -- without them, without those who put Bush over the top in '04, Republicans don't stand a chance in November.

It's almost enough to make you feel sorry for the president. If only for a split second.