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Now some here would have us believe that by converting FR into an echo chamber of Party loyalists, FR would be more Supportive of the President.

I would expect some people to say that, and I would expect other people to tell them to pound sand. It will always be thus. I figure the optimum strategy is to howl like a banshee about all the things I don't like, right up until election day. And then vote for Bush anyway. But I wouldn't want him to know I'm going to do that. If he doesn't worry that I might stay home, he has no reason to listen to my howling.

But to be effective, my howling has to be about something that might conceivably be a widely-shared concern. If my issue is abolishing paper money and returning to gold and silver coins, it almost doesn't matter what I do because it's such a fringe issue.

Now I'm told that this concern about the immigration proposal is widely shared, as opposed to being narrowly shared among some especially loud people. I don't know. Here's what I don't believe: I don't believe that this White House didn't do serious polling on the subject before unveiling this proposal. All these experts on this thread who tell us that the White House has no idea how the voters feel about this are, IMHO, unlikely to be correct. That a self-selected sample of people who are especially hot about the issue are making noise on talk radio, or are bombarding the CongressCritters, is not the same thing as "how will this affect votes in the election?" As the Deaniac said, "Fervor Isn’t Votes ."

let's not become an Echo Chamber for any one strain of thought. Let's not even desire it.

That's not a risk I worry about. It is true that Jim has a lower tolerance for the Art Bell wing of conservative thought than he once did, but one can certainly wander two or three standard deviations away from the mean without getting nuked.

"I would expect some people to say that, and I would expect other people to tell them to pound sand. It will always be thus. I figure the optimum strategy is to howl like a banshee about all the things I don't like, right up until election day. And then vote for Bush anyway. But I wouldn't want him to know I'm going to do that. If he doesn't worry that I might stay home, he has no reason to listen to my howling."

A succinct explanation of what I am trying to do [for this election only, your mileage may vary]