Fellow radio talk show host Michael Medved and I appeared with Ohio candidates Josh Mandel and Jim Renacci at a forum in a Cleveland suburb last week.
Mandel — joshmandel.com — is the Republican candidate for the Buckeye State’s treasurer’s job. Mandel’s already in the state Assembly and has served two tours in Iraq with the Marines. He was also the student body president at Ohio State University before enlisting in both the military and politics.
Renacci — renacciforcongress.com — is a very successful businessman and former mayor and councilman in Wadsworth, Ohio, whose election would bring to a total of six the number of certified public accountants in Congress. Renacci is running against Rep. John “Backflip” Boccieri in Ohio’s 16th District. Boccieri was against Obamacare before he voted for it.
Among the four of us was represented a pretty broad spectrum of experiences and positions, so when the questions began to come in from the crowd of 800, we were ready for anything.
Two hours after we began, we had fielded several dozen questions, most of which had to do with spending. No one raised the issue of illegal immigration. Not one.
This relative lack of priority given immigration among this center-right audience is also reflected in the calls to my radio show and the e-mails to my Web site. There are, of course, hard-core anti-illegal immigration activists for whom the issue has never lost a bit of salience in the three years since the collapse of the immigration reform push under President George W. Bush.
This core is celebrating the passage of the new Arizona statute, as are Democrats generally and President Obama specifically.
Because the issue divides Republicans and unites Democrats, the president’s team is thankful for an issue on which to pivot away from Obamacare. Reform of the financial sector is simply not a numbers driver, and has failed to dampen the public’s intense concern over the growth of the federal government and the federal takeover of the health care system.
Longtime Democrats in great numbers and massive numbers of independents have turned their backs on the hard-left congressional Democrats led by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.
Which is why a hard push for immigration reform is the perfect play for Democrats, an invitation for the GOP to lose its focus and its new adherents in the next few months.
This moment of opportunity to set the country on a new course should not be sacrificed to the old debate over immigration. All the GOP need do is insist on completion of the border fence as a prerequisite to any program of partial regularization of the millions of illegals in the country.
The Republicans do not have to heat up the rhetoric or provide detailed responses to Democratic proposals.
They need to point to 22,000 murders and an escalating drug war south of the border and demand — again and again — that any overhaul of the immigration laws no matter what the details must take a backseat to the national security issues presented by a porous border. “Finish the fence,” they ought to say, “then we will talk, and not until then.”
That is a persuasive — and complete — answer to the president’s attempt to turn the debate away from the growing recognition that Obamacare was a disaster, and the deficit and debt risk giving the country a fiscal stroke.
Focus and restraint are in order, not demands for a showdown on immigration.
Like our audience in Cleveland and over the air, the GOP needs to listen to the public and address its priorities, not those of the president or the hard core on either edge of the immigration debate.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host who blogs daily at HughHewitt.com.
