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Oh Fer The Love Of God!

I always say (to myself, anyway) you wait long enough... and there will surely be something to blog about. 

Sure enough, I decide to wait until the end of Easter/Passover vacation to get started again... and there you go.

Google's decision to run a graphic for the birthday of Cesar Chavez on Easter should really be no big deal - though I have to admit, I was a little surprised, until I realized they were the same day. Easter was a busy day this year - I'm now on Facebook, and two other FB friends (or as I used to say, friends) also had birthdays on Easter. And it was Easter. And Passover.... and a bunch of other stuff, which was kind of sad.

Anyway, I don't think it's surprising, exactly, that the conservative right went nuts over the linking of Chavez to Easter - or, more hilariously, that they mistook Cesar Chavez for Hugo Chavez, the recently deceased leader of Venezuela, which made them all the angrier. I mean, as they say, we do all look alike, especially when the last names are similar. 

In the wake of Republicans trying to rebuild a relationship with Latin Americans, though, this farce is basically example A of why most of these efforts are doomed. Too often and for too long, the right wing's predictable responses to even the mildest discussions of liberal figures - Cesar's hardly worth the controversy, and let's face it, Hugo's dead - is screaming outrage. And the outrage just seems misplaced - and in the case of Venezuela, awfully late now that the real question is whether Venezuela will simply fall apart in the wakr of his (er, Hugo's) death.

But the enmity for the Chavezes and all they represent - the union building, poverty work and immigration friendly politics of Cesar; or the communistic approach to governing Venezuela more in favor of the downtrodden - is what's really going to keep conservatism, and by extension the GOP, from going wide. There's just got to be something about Hispanic culture and politics that conservatives have to figure out how to support and present positively, or it's just, don't bother. This story is already over.

And it's not as though liberals are going to care deeply about whether Republicans get this right or not - frankly, at this point, the left's view of the right's Hispanic outreach is just that, as farce. The guys who want double edged barbed wire along the Mexican border, whose most extreme elements would actually try to round up "illegals" in every corner of the country and deport them, whose last Presidential candidate attracted about 30% of the Latin vote - these guys are not people we take seriously as any sort of threat. Have at it guys, because at the rate you're going, we'll get Hispanic support for the Democrats up to or near the 90+% numberws we enjoy with African Americans. Not even trying.

Of course, beyond the gloating, all of this is depressing. It's depressing to hear the shrill rhetoric opposed to anything that might make life even sort of slightly better for people on the edges of society, be they migrant farmworkers or the poorest citizens of a third world country. It's disheartening to see people you might otherwise at least respect as thoughtful opponents descend into the absurd anger and shrieking of the fringiest conservative elements, or even at a minimum, simply draw a line, any line, about rhetoric that goes too far. When Don Young of Alaska, a member of House leadership, blithely refers to "wetbacks" with little more than "oh, gee" from other Republicans, that's the kind of thing that shows what the right accepts in its senior leadership. For God's sake, this isn't hard.

But then that's Easter in the land of politics: dressing things up, trying to put a kindly face on the oldest of stories (I've always preferred the Potestant version, which sems to focus on the white light and the post-rising Good News rather than the more Catholic-seeming obsession with the pain and suffering He felt on the cross), candy coating the bad stuff so we won't maybe notice. The same week of all these Hispanic fumbles, the right is practically in seizures as (several) lifetimes of antigay rhetoric don't add up to a hill of beans fighting marriage equality, the battle they can lose now, or lose later. By Sunday, even Catholic priests in America were scrambling to find the right words to try and evince some sort of caring for gay people, even while condeming homosexuality and absolutey trying to rule marriage off limits. The contortions were breathtaking, the mixed messages were head scratchingly confused. We - the angry gay radicals of near limitless power, thank you John Roberts - have apparently managed, if nothing else, to turn "homophobia" into such a dirty word that conservatives almost universally flinch as they try to expalin opposing unions for people they really, really... well, we don't hate them, we just think they should settle for second best... or something. Really... breathtaking.

It's a weird Easter this year - it came too early, the weather's too weird for it, all of these crazy controversies and a new Pope who seems, genuinely, to believe that "poverty" and "humility" are not just nice words but a better, more honest way, to approach one's duties as a Priest. No cars, furs, or penthouse papal apartments? Good lord, now what?

It's a weird Easter, in some weird zone between secular and religious, where liberal theology and social justice apparently won the war while no one was looking. A moment when the Christian, decent things we can all pretty much sign on to - treating each other decently, caring for those less fortunate, helping those in actual need - seem to trump the less pleasing notions of doing for ourselves, getting what's mine, and judging others with a critical eye. It's an Easter big enough for the death of Christ, the birthday of the man who stood for farm workers, and even my friend the married gay minister. And that's pretty good... for the love of God.

Related articles

It's Cesar Chavez, You Idiots! Not Hugo!

Google angers Christian right by honouring socialist at Easter - Hamilton Spectator

The Change We Cannot Make

Six or so years ago, I started a blog; partly out of a passion to write, and partly because, I realized soon after starting it, I was immensely frustrated by the politics of the early 2000s.

At the time I wasn't alone, and a whole world of blogging grew and thrived and started the wave of change that, I'm convinced, eventually swept Barack Obama into the White House. 

Six years later, life is different, politics is different, and my passion for writing... drifted. This year I largely sat out the election, and blogging - both thoroughly disenchanted with the politics of right now, and pursuing some personal ambitions.

In any case, I'm glad I waited. Now, I feel like I have something to say. Again.

For months - probably close to a year - I've been gamely predicting to anyone who'd listen that Barack Obama would, most likely, be reelected by a grim electorate who, while clearly not impressed with his first term, saw little alternative. When Mitt Romney steamrolled his way to the GOP nomination, I calmly told family and friends that America would not elect him President.

Yeah, I feel pretty vindicated, but that's not really my point.

Mitt Romney was a bad bet that Republicans made whose loss confirmed political ideas I've been trumpeting for months, if not years: that Republicans have deep internal issues that must be addressed to grow and thrive, that anger alone cannot win an election of make a movement, and that both Mormonism and a pronounced inability to seem genuine or sincere wrecked Romney well before the debates. I feel particularly heartened that the dark witch's brew of undiscussed racial bias and deep personal hatred for Obama of many conservatives led to nothing but failure. And I remain amazed about how months of obvious indications of Romney's unfitness - the "47 percent" remarks, the lack of any common touch, the ham-handed inability to note any comprehension of the problems ordinary people face - still left so many with some sense that Romney could win this. He couldn't. He never could.

More obviously, though, this election is yet further confirmation, as if we needed it, that the Presidency of George W. Bush and the worst tendencies of the conservative movement have combined to create a Republican Party on a slow path to complete failure. Virtually everything about this election underlines that reality:

A Nation Of Laws. Occasionally, Also, Lousy Ones.

I've been on a break - and how - from writing, especially about politics, for a number of reasons. Much of it is related to my promotion at work, which has consumed a great deal of my time; other life interests are intervening as well. Still, I've also been so thoroughly disgusted with much of what passes for politics lately, that a general run of silence seemed the most practical response. 

Lately, I've been finding myself waiting - like others - for the Supreme Court's health care decision; since until they provide some clarity on something, it's hard to say where health care issues really are, politically. But yesterday brought a decision in the Arizona immigration case, and it reminded me of a couple of things that I think have been lost in a lot of recent political handwringing.

Let's start with the fact that striking down Arizona's immigration law was really the only sensible, plainly logical step to be taken. Giving state and local law enforcement broad powers to stop and check the immigration status of anyone was everything its opponents claimed: probably racist, an intrusion by the state into federal jurisdiction, and no solution to the ostensible problem it claimed to solve.

It shouldn't, really, be remarkable that the Supreme Court invalidated large chunks of the law. Yet the decision, clearly, surprised both overconfident conservatives who expected to celebrate the power of a newfound majority, and a shock to liberals sure that conservative politics would trump common sense and basic decency.

That's why I think the decision was a good reminder of a couple of less discussed points: that being a nation of laws actually matters, and that conservatives cannot win a battle based on a failed idea like "states rights."

The concept of States Rights - that the federal government has amassed too much power and control and some of that should return, naturally, to the various 50 states, has its roots in the Civil Rights era, though the concept is older, and reflects the basic tension of founding a country of states bound together by a Constitution and a central government (and a lesson in how not to do this, lately, is the European Union). Fundamentally, States Rights is an argument that variations in governing and laws between the states are okay, so long as certain "basic" functions of government are handled nationally. States Rights was a partciularly attractive argument to white southerners looking for a way to carve out protections first for slavery, then for Jim Crow and voting rights limitations (not to mention disparities in education between the races, and so on). 

The idea of states prevailing over the federal government is a dream of the right which has never really won out - in most cases, especially the high profile ones, the Supreme Court has pretty firmly restated the primacy of federal law and national government every time. Even the occasional nibbling at the edges - such as the surprise ruling in the "Guns 500 feet from schools" ruling that placed some limitations on the Commerce Clause (that is, that Congress' power to regulate interstate commerce will generally overcome objections to most laws) - have never really embraced the idea that the States can supersede federal power in siginificant ways.

In this sense, the decision in the Arizona case wasn;'t even close: it was a 5-3 decision, with Elena Kagan recused (remember when liberals fretted that Kagan's appointment would be a disaster for cases where she would recuse, like the Arizona immigration case?), and Kagan clearly would have sided with the majority, making it 6-3 (or 7-2 where Justice Alito agreed with the majority as well). Even with a spate of "conservative" appointments, some of the biggest conservative goals - like significantly lmiting the ability of federal law to trump states - remain almost entirely out of reach. And despite continued liberal handwringing, that still isn't likely to change.

This isn't to say that we're living in a moment where conservatism poses no threat, or to deny that some decisions by the Court clearly set up problems (though I'm not one to see Citizens United as the disaster many want to see it as).  But time and again, with each successive conservative appointment, we're told that this one means legal armageddon on the Court. While the reality is that in many ways - this week, most obviously on immigration and children facing life without parole - we conitnue to see that liberal ideas tend to continue to win out.

More pointedly, what we've seen this week is that fears about the Court being solely about the easy political divides of left and right miss the reality that the Justices are still deeply concerned most with the law and interpreting it properly. Our long history as a nation of laws has given us a Supreme Court that tends to favor established precedent, that tends to err on the side of our freedoms, and manages, surprisingly often, to adapt our legal system to the changing realities of the world (as they did this year, when a surprising majority ruled electronic surveillance of a car by GPS an illegal search because placing the GPS device requires a warrant). We would have better politics, and a healthier debate, I'm convinced, if we could stop casting the Supreme Court into a role it doesn't play in our political life. Rather than fear the worst, we could wait, calmly, for the Court to do its best. And realize that extreme, untenable views of the law will be marginalized in the Court even when they can't be entirely marginalized in leglislatures and even society.

A corollary to that thought is that liberals really ought to stop approaching these halthy debates of issues from an endless defensive crouch; we've always been right about rejecting States Rights arguments, and we continue to be right. As long as Republicans chase a dwindling, extreme minority of angry, mostly, white, mostly older, conservatives, they will continue to marginalize themselves into irrelevance. Immigration is a difficult, complicated issue that won't be easy to solve (and the reforms we need, I suspect, are ones that involve controls and restrictions some liberals will not like)... but conservatives will continue to lose, and lose big, favoring a closed nation with fences and guard dogs and random stops and arrests. That's not who we are. And as liberals, we should be confident to say that, and hold to it.

I don't know what the coming days hold in terms of the health insurance mandate and the Court's decisions; I have suspicions, ones that the Arizona case only reinforced, but I admit the possibility that liberals could lose, and lose big. And maybe there is a newfound, newly powerful conservative majority. But if there were, as with Arizona, I'd think we'd see more evidence of it than we've seen thus far. If this Court is serious about our nation of laws, as they seem to be, then the law will guide them to a sensible result. And bad laws can be fixed, too.

By All Means, Let's Make The Election About Domesticated Fags And Loose Living Tramps (Thanks, Newt!)

I have to admit I pretty much figured this year's Presidential election was foreordained as a Romney vs. Obama slugfest over the economy, with a predictable, if dismal, win for President Obama. And that's probably what we're still going to get. But how we get there, apparently, still matters.

If Romney has failed to exactly inspire the Republican base, the last couple of weeks haven't been entirely about him. What's changed, I thnk, is that Rconservatives have decided that they can't win on economic issues... and so they unpacked their favorite old trunk, the thing we often call "social issues."

Maybe it's age, maybe it's the sense that I've heard this song before, but my patience for euphemisms is pretty much gone. And so, I am tired of hearing about "social issues" when what people mean is "let's say awful things about blacks, gays and other minorities and see if Americans will give in to their worst instincts."

"Social Issues" is supposed to be about abortion, gay marriage, "family values" and the like, but really, it's about dressing up age-old prejudices and judgements about others without saying the ugly words. What's wrong with gay marriage? Something about men, women, tradition and procreation... since marriage equality opponents insist, all the time, that they don't hate gays. And what's behind the spate of new restrictive abortion laws and the brouhaha over Catholic charities and insurance coverage for contraception? Concern for life and religious freedom, not hatred of women or opposition to contraception, since that's what they keep telling us.

If there's a reason American conservatism has utterly failed to broaden its appeal, certainly in the past thirty years, it has a lot to do with just how negatve and unappealing their pitch has been. There's been virtually nothing positive that conservatives have had to offer, nothing but anti-this and opposition to that. Immigration, in fact, is a perfectly sensible issue that really does need reform, but it's become a "social issue" about the Mexican border and a specific group of undocumented immigrants because... well, "anti-Hispanic" isn't attractive, either. 

It's not surprising, really, that conservatives have drifted back into this corner; an actual election about economic injustice and issues like health care would have been an interesting discussion, especially if the right had something to offer groups of people - especially in the working class - who have really been shafted, left and right, over time. But of course, Republicans have nothing to offer on jobs, housing, financial reform, or health care. All they have is an intense dislike for President Obama and anything he's done on those issues. 

I'm not sure Mitt Romney really does have anything to offer, but to his credit, he's studiously avoided reverting to the social issues morass unless heavily pushed; it's not really the Mormon way (Orrin Hatch is a good example of this), and it's not Romney's style to appeal to people's worse instincts. So perhaps it's understandable that the "not-Romneys" of the primary season have found themselves forced to resort to the basest appeals to the base.

Of all of them, though, I suspect the real turning point  was South Carolina and Newt Gingrich's win; Gingrich really had nothing to offer except boilerplate rhetoric built on right wing talk radio bromides, the familiar litany of how things are terrible and liberals are to blame for it.  It's Gingrich who, rather skillfully, re-introduced the sham issue of insurance coverage for contraception. And Gingrich offered the kind of rhetorical cover that conservatives need to revert to "social issues" as their driving force - we're not clased-minded bigots... we're decent people looking out for America, and the Constitution.

Of course, Gingrich himself is a twice divorced Catholic convert who would, literally, say just about anything to win an election, and the dissonance between who he is and what he says just got more pronounced as his prominence grew. Rick Santorum, on the other hand, doesn't have quite that problem. Unlike almost any of the other conservatives who got big and flamed out, Santorum doesn't have to go to some of the ugliest places to sell his fealty to "social issues"; he's already been there (remember "man on dog"?). And so Santorum pitches himself as the populist voice of the unheard working (white) man (and we do mean men), and all of the "social" issues are covered as well.

I don't know if Santorum can actually ride this wave all the way to the Republican nopmination; it would be frankly hilarious if he pulls it off, but we (and he) can't possibly be that lucky. It's telling, though, that Romney and his team are, yet again, flummoxed by Santorum's success. He's the one thing they don't quite have an argument against: a true believer who thinks moderation is for wimps.

Either way, an election that revolves around the angry right renewing its worst calls against gays, pushing familiar virgin/whore/mommy lines about women's roles in society, selling familiar prejudices about blacks and hispanics... is an election held on familiar ground that they really can't win. There's too many of us, too few of them, and too many like me who are tired of listening to carefully chosen words meant to mask really hateful ideas and prejudices. None of it makes President Obama a better President, but it certainly makes clear the starkness of the choice. Which is a much easier election than the one about those pesky problems with jobs and housing and health care and such. 

The Song Remains The Same

So… President Obama has given another speech this week on immigration; it appears to be very similar to the last speech he gave, not just in tone and content, but also in timing. That is, he gives a speech on immigration well before the primary elections of the next election cycle. In it, he bemoans the failure of Republicans to do little more than posture on border security, insists that he does not favor anything like amnesty for millions of undocumented workers, and then adds some blather about how we need better policies to train the best and brightest and encourage them to stay in our economy, rather than going back to their home countries after their student visas expire.

I could – and have, repeatedly – give chapter and verse on why virtually all of this is wrong-headed and about the exact opposite of a useful, usable approach to immigration reform… but as with so many political stories these days, this is not new and doesn’t add much to an existing debate.

Instead, I just offer these few observations: It’s amazing how minority voters fall for this speech, repeatedly, as some indication that the President is “doing something” when in fact he’s done nothing at all (except, as many note, continued arrests and deportations much the way his predecessor did). Second, nothing about immigration is going to change until someone focuses on the reform of actual immigration process and USCIS. And third, nothing about this kind of cheap political posturing is going to change until Democrats who care about actual immigration reform actually replace a lot of senior Democratic Party leaders.

 

Don’t say no one told you.

The Crying Game... And Chasing The "Progressive Presidency" Unicorn

The break from political writing that I took to do a play was helped in no small part by the stagnant realities of national politics. A month of generally keeping up with the news made clear to me, anyway, that nothing really has been changing, or making much progress.

Yet, the constant drip of stories and polls suggests considerable dissatisfaction with how things are, especialy politically. There's a lot of theorizing about why this is so, much of it centered on dissatisfaction with the President, or his Administration, or policies they've attempted or achieved.

As someone who's been sitting on the sidelines watching, I tend to share the general dissatisfaction... and the vagueness which surrounds it. Something's wrong... but just what it might be isn't exactly clear.

I've asked friends and listened to starngers, and what I've come down to is that much of the "dissatisfaction with Obama" isn't really about him or his Presidency so much as the general state of affairs (especially the economy) in the country and a question of leadership which is larger than Obama himself. And with that, I think, is also the continuing struggle to better define the politics of both left and right as demographics shift and parties are redefined.

And none of that, really, can be resolved anytime soon.

Um... What Were We Talking About Again?

In the wake of Tuesday's primary results, and a slew of political developments in the past few days (I do, as well, plan to talk about, um, ...Rand Paul? Is that his name?... in a separate post), I've been struck by the resumption of a familiar aspect of the recent deep partisan divides: that there are multiple conversations happening, each largely ignoring the others.

As a lefty, I notice it especially in the right's determined silence, and fleeing from, most discussions of Rand Paul, and more specifically, refusing to touch the Civil Rights Act of 1964. I mean - Christ - even Jeff Sessions (that's Jefferson Beauregard Sessions) came out to say the Civil Rights Act was basically a good thing and Paul was wrong about the regulation of private business. And that's more than most people on the right did.

The relative silence on Paul and his fairly pure approach to libertarian ideals (I even slogged my way through multiple pages of the usually nutty Redstate bloggers to be sure), seems to be a tacit admission that initial cheering for Paul's solidifying Tea Party power was premature. Cooler heads that long predicted Paul was a disaster waiting to happen turned out - sooner than I think anyone expected - to be more than a little accurate.

Bigotry, Elitism, and Gordo's Big Gaffe

For more than a day I heard about a "big gaffe" in the upcoming election race in the UK, without knowing what the big deal was. Mostly... I didn't really care enough to investigate; I've never entirely understood the level of political junkie that requires a constant fix of an election somewhere, at all times, and I don't buy - as those heavily invested argue - that the British elections actually tell us all that much about US approaches to politics. I prefer a land where RuPaul is the Queen, thank you very much.

Still, Gordon Brown's gaffe - after doing a "walkabout" in a neighborhood outside London, he complained to his staff about a difficult conversation with one voter, who he termed "bigoted" for bringing up immigration issues in England (most everyone knows, I guess, that the British are struggling with an influx of East Asians, many of them Muslim). Brown, already in trouble as unpopular (he replaced Tony Blair after having served as Blair's Chancellor of the Exchequer, or their Treasury head, right before the Big Meltdown), has apparently done himself in, laying the groundwork for the Tories to take a small majority, or putting the country's third party, the Liberal Democrats, in a position to play Kingmaker in Parliament in a coalition.

Again, I'm not riveted by any of this, so you don't have to be, either.

What did strike me interesting, as it did for many - aside from Brown being yet another dope who doesn't make sure his mike is off before speaking - was Brown's striking use of "bigoted" to describe the concerns of a white, working class woman. Brown's been nailed, basically, for being the Labour Party leader who's out of touch with, well, Labour. And that, really, does seem to parallel of lot of what's happening, and not happening, on the American left as well.

I haven't seen many people make much of the class/elitist angle this story brings up, and I was a little worried tonight when I discovered that Rod Dreher, a conservative writer I admire, but still disagree with often, noticed the same thing. But, true to his questioning, broad thinking nature, Dreher gets it more than most:

For people of my social and cultural class, illegal immigration isn't a problem. It staffs the restaurants we love, it gets our grass cut, and it offers us a chance to preen morally about how open we are to diversity, etc. But for some of the folks I met in Dallas, it was a completely different matter. Yes, there was some racism there, no question. But these were also people whose neighborhoods were changing, and not for the better, because of immigration and crime. These were people who didn't have a choice about sending their kids to private schools, and whose public schools were being overcrowded by children who spoke no English, and who had to be taught somehow. These were people whose economic circumstances forced them to depend on public hospitals for care, and who had trouble getting into those hospitals because the waiting rooms were jammed with illegal immigrants. And so forth.

Generally speaking, we journalists don't really care about those people, except to dismiss them privately, among ourselves, as bigots. Maybe they are bigots to a certain extent. But so are we, and we are bigoted against ... them. (If we define "bigoted" as having malign prejudices unsupported by the facts). But because of our own class and cultural biases, we don't see it. Epistemic closure, again. As Gabriel Winant observes:

Something's not working about the post-industrial economy, either in Britain or in the U.S. With economic growth limited to the rich few, a feeling sets in of being abandoned by haughty elites and their impenetrable institutions , among which are the free labor markets that drive immigration. And then, when they catch a glimpse of this anger, leaders like Brown don't know what to do or say except to condemn.

Exactly. And politicians of the left and the right aren't the only ones at fault.

It's rare to see this kind of candor, and also to get at the layers of issues that surround immigration while avoiding a lot of the hot-button word choices that inflame passions on the issue. And I think it's just the complexity that Dreher draws out on who is affected most by immigration issues that explains why the immigration cuts badly across both political parties here and why sorting out immigration reform is so far off.

Then too, I'm always struck by how the discussion of elitism and class differences plays out - how defensive many educated elite professionals get when you point out that, from a class perspective, they have little, if any connection to the working classes, and often no real feel for the issues others face (check out the feedback Dreher got just as a sample). What follows from that, really, is something that bewilders me all the more: okay, if you don't know... why not go find out? Dreher does, I do... and I know others do as well. We seek out people different form us, take in their perspective without judging it, and try to see the complexities in the issues we care about. That just makes sense to me; it's odd to me that others don't see it.

That's why, for instance, while I think Ta-Nehisi Ciates is trying, in a well meaning way, to look closely at the new Arizona law, he's falling into the notion many East Coast liberals are - seeing all of what's happened with an eye towards racism and prejudice, rather than facing the frustrations of people who live the problems of illegal immigration far more immediately than we do in much of the Northeast (and I don't just mean suburbs and upscale communities - even urban centers where undocumented immigration is an issue are much different here than along the Southwest border). I'm not arguing for some idea that the law is okay or should be accepted; but to deal with the problems the new law raises in an intelligent way, I think, requires facing up to the problems created by an uncontrolled border and a broken system for dealing with immigration. And it doesn't make one a "bigot" to be concerned about immigration, any more than it makes one "racist" to be critical of our black President. What we do about the class divide, though, I can't say - except, maybe, that we're not going to find a solution looking across the pond.
 

Neither Party Is Mine Not The Jackass Or The Elephant

Like clockwork, the Arizona Immigration Mess has "returned immigration reform to the table" with the appearance of a new "framework" for a bill in the Senate. And if anything shows why now is not the time to take this up again - and the Arizona mess is a lousy way to start the discussion - it's the outline of the bill under discussion.

Indeed, the bill arrived, as the last few immigration stabs have, pretty much DOA. It didn't take much more than a day for Harry Reid to say immigration was moving to the "front of the line" (that phrase should be killed, now) in Senate business - after, you know, they "do something" about financial reform - only to have Reid pull that back by Friday, when it became clear that the oil spill made it moere important to do window dressing on the environmental bill instead.

It's just as well, because the new "framework" is pretty much the old bill in a new dress - a lot of money and stuff thrown at enforcement of the southern border, and weak stabs at adding yet more visa classifications to the alphabet soup of existing visas, and no real attempts to reform USCIS in any meaningful way. The right instantly jumped up screaming "amnesty" and the left immediately glommed onto the excessive elements of enforcement. And the merry dance started again.

One reason we desperately need a shakeup of established, tired leadership in both houses, especially among Democrats, is because all of this is so off the shelf - say "healthcare" and they pull out a half dozen old bills and smush them together. Say "environmental issues" and they pull out the same bill as last year and start pushing it again. Say immigration, and we're right back where we were in 2007 - more discussions of the southern border, "path to citizenship" fictions about people already here, and no real movement on what's so deeply broken in the immigration process.

I don't, really, care about the right and the crazy conservative xenophobia - it's not who we are as Americans, and while it appeals to a certain kind of cruel streak we have, it can't really win in the end. What depresses me is that, yet again, I'm stuck with these people I'd like to be supporting in my own party, who keep messing it up. It's embarrassing to call what was trotted out this week anything like a serious attempt to think harder about reforming our immigration system, make a better process, and fix what's broken. That's the party I signed on for, and by the time I get to Arizona... I don't recognize them at all. And I have no idea, none, about what to do about it.

The Paper Chase

I'm not going to claim some special expertise when it comes to Arizona... but it's weird to have been there so recently and to watch the immigration debate unfolding around their new law - a law, I have to mention, that seemed to be on no one's mind while we were there.

It's easy to write the angry, left side "how could they do this" screed - as Linda Greenhouse shows, it practically writes itself - but I think the whole unease about "show us your papers" and the intrusive, ugly aspects of the new law are readily apparent, and we've yet to see the worst case scenarios play out. Very likely, we never will. And these exercises in high dudgeon, while necessary, don't necessarily deal with the hard issues around immigration that many - especially the educated, northeastern professional class who can live largely above and beyond the practical effects of immigration issues - don't want to look at in depth.

Indeed, I think the immigration debates of the second Bush term tended to end with "do we really have to do this now", and that feeling, I suspect, is coloring the return of the issue now. As much as there is real fear and real loathing of the new Arizona law, I think the main tone of dismissal is exasperation, a "not here and not now" admonition to a misbehaving child at the mall, where everyone can see. That certainly seems to drive the latest Obama Administration reaction, as they've done so often, of "if we make the appropriate clucking noises and promise to do something real soon, maybe this will just go away."

In terms of doing something, this year, on immigration, I'm betting this will go away, somehow, and soon; there's no real appetite to argue this (again) on the national stage, no one has a good solution, and the politics of immigration cut badly across both parties, something lefties don't like to discuss (because it's about working class resentments about illegal immigrants and the lack of low level jobs) and Republicans like to wish away (because reasonable, thinking conservatives are as disdainful of the ugly xenophobia being sold to the masses as are the actual conservative immigrants who want some immigration reform... just not extremes like this).

But mostly, I think, there's this fantasy, both right and left, that the Arizona law, somehow, just happened out of the right wing, racist, primordial ooze, and that's not the case. I saw enough of Arizona to get that, even though it seemed out of the blue, this turn of events isn't necessarily surprising, and it is borne of a frustration that we can't, for much longer, not talk, and not do something about the immigration mess we have on our hands.