Having read this, now it makes more sense to me why Bush will not pardon Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Juan Compean.
Bush doesn't want to dare to anger the Hispanic and Illegal vote.
Posted on 02/03/2008 7:06:49 PM PST by Signalman
A deal was made. I don’t know where (I suspect Washington), I don’t know when (I suspect prior to the 2004 campaign), I don’t know what (I suspect McCain was to leave Bush a clear field in 2004 in exchange for Bush’s support in 2008).
I can’t prove it, but a deal was made. I’m sure of it.
I elaborated on the idea here:
Ironically, the erstwhile “maverick” is pursuing an insider strategy, hiring George W. Bush’s consultants, lining up local party loyalists and shaking the same establishment money tree that, in the 2000 campaign, he complained had given Bush a pampered, rich kid’s advantage.
And, I suspect, using Bush’s very own private Big Black Book to do it with.
I remind you of this as a prelude to my analysis of what is happening in the current GOP primary race, and why it is happening the way it is.
Do not be fooled. What you are witnessing today is a war for the soul, if it can be said to have one, of the Republican party. One one side is the GOP machine establishment - represented by the Bushes, the Roves, and all the family and political dynasty politicians and their strategists who have tried to keep control of the party over the years.
On the other side are those whom the establishment regards as the barbarians at the gates: the rabble who listen to the conservative talk shows, the talker hosts themselves, the “Reagan Republicans,” the Gingrich revolutionaries, and now the bloggers and their readers.
This is, in a nutshell, a war between those who value principle over power, and those for whom power is first, foremost, and nearly everything.
I have felt for quite a while that the Bushes made a deal with McCain - that in exchange for his support of the establishment (McCain is about as much a “maverick” as George Herbert Walker Bush or Bob Dole), Bush and the establishment would back him in his run for the Presidency this year. I’ve seen nothing to disabuse me of that notion.
The battle that shook everything up was the temporary defeat of the GOP establishment over illegal immigration during the past two years.
It has been an article of faith among GOP establishment strategists like Rove that the way to continued power is to enlist the waves of immigrant Hispanics, both legal and illegal, into the GOP. From their point of view, it looked like a slam dunk. They’d had no luck in prying other ethnic votes away from the Democrats - the black vote in particular - but the Hispanics were flooding in in such numbers they made the other ethnic voting groups look insignificant in comparison. And there was nothing in the Hispanic culture that necessarily favored the left. Hispanics tend to be old-line Catholic, and abortion is a big issue with them, a fact that favored the GOP, not the Democrats. Hispanics also tended toward hard work and entrepreneurial endeavors, again a cultural bias that tends to favor stated GOP principles, not vice versa - and that was even more true with second generation Hispanics, who assimilated quite well into the larger American culture.
These GOP strategists were also aware that other demographic trends were moving away from them. The aging of America will move tens of millions of Boomers into the group of net receivers of government largess, primarily Social Security and Medicare. That makes them prime territory for the left, no matter what their political tendencies might have been during their productive working years.
In short, the GOP establishment perceives the entire nation moving leftwards, and a long time ago made the decision to move the GOP to the left in order to keep in step with the culture at large. George Bush was the first of the “new breed” of GOP establishment characters to achieve the White House, with his doctrine of “compassionate” (liberal) conservatism. And it seemed to work. At least, it kept him in the White House for two terms, if only with razor thin wins each time.
So imagine the shock of the establishment when the single biggest building block of their “new GOP coalition” was dealt a shattering blow by the defeat of their attempt to legalize, via amnesty, the status of some ten-twenty million illegal Hispanic aliens currently residing in the U.S.
Suddenly, staring them right in the face, they saw the ruination of all their carefully constructed plans, and with that, a concomitant loss of power! And what - or who - was the cause?
Those damned barbarian conservatives, who don’t understand that principles don’t win elections, nor are elections about anything other than who gets to exercise power. Rabble! Principled fools!
And thus the battle lines were joined for real.
John McCain is the standard bearer this year. The establishment GOP machine is one hundred percent behind him. Opposed to him is the conservative coalition of talkers and bloggers and their consumers - it is a battle between the media and ideological assets of both sides.
The conservatives won the immigration battle with a shocking defeat for the establishment. Now the battle is joined again over the Presidency - and if John McCain is nominated and then wins the general election, the American conservative movement may never recover. On the other hand, a crushing McCain defeat in the general, attributed primarily to the refusal of the conservative movement to support him, will be an equally crushing defeat for the GOP establishment attempting to remake the party in its preferred liberal-conservative image - an image in which the “conservative” part is mostly window dressing for the suckers.
I’m posting this in an effort to demonstrate to you what is really at stake here: It’s not whether McCain is marginally better or worse than any Democrat candidate. It’s what the future of the GOP will look like. And what your future will look like.
Didn’t phase ‘em a bit.
Come hell or high water the establishment GOP is going to have it’s way.
Disgusting.
Had he done so, McCain would have lost some votes, but he would have picked up a fair number of "sympathy" votes since Romney was so mean to him. Mitt Romney would have lost votes because he was so nasty, with some those votes going to Huckabee. McCain would probably have ended up with more votes than Huckabee, and he and Huckabee together would have had a majority, thus leading to a McCain/Huckabee ticket.
Let them all go back to the country club and lick their wounds and wonder why. A crushing defeat is what they need and what they will get if McCain is the nominee.
Interesting.
McCain hates Bush until he needs him.
Having read this, now it makes more sense to me why Bush will not pardon Border Patrol Agents Ignacio Ramos and Juan Compean.
Bush doesn't want to dare to anger the Hispanic and Illegal vote.
“McCain hates Bush until he needs him.”
McCain hates everybody ‘til he needs them. He can just keep hating me for all I care.
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