RUSH: Grab number 19 out there, Ed. Mrs. Clinton got booed on the phone. She was appearing in an Iowa event by phone Saturday, couldn’t get there because of weather. The Immigrant and Refugee Rights member Billy Lawless has asked her a question. He’s not happy with her response. He asked her, ‘Will you in the first hundred days, will you come up with comprehensive immigration reform?’ Well, she did the usual Hillary dance around it, didn’t mention the first hundred days, so he fired back with this.
HILLARY: Well, you gotta get the Congress to pass the legislation. The president can do as much as possible, which I will do.
RUSH: That was the second. She got booed three different times over that question and the subject of illegal immigration. This was just a day after she had looked so presidential and so authoritative in dealing with this crisis at her campaign headquarters in Rochester, New Hampshire. Then there’s this from Joe Klein at TIME Magazine: ‘A few days after Thanksgiving, I asked Mike Huckabee what had surprised him about voters over the past six months of campaigning. ‘The intensity of the immigration issue,’ he said immediately, and then added, ‘I honestly don’t know why it’s gotten so hot.’ Huckabee gets points for candor: most of the presidential candidates I’ve spoken with in recent months feel the same way but aren’t about to say so. It is difficult to spend a day on the trail and not see the anger explode,’ over illegal immigration. ‘This is especially true in the Republican Party. John McCain, the sponsor of immigration-reform legislation, has been a target.’ He goes on to talk about some of the attacks and reactions he’s gotten.
‘There are signs of festering intolerance even among Democratic audiences, noticeably in Iowa, which has seen a surge of Latino immigration in recent years. The Democratic candidates are uniformly in favor of comprehensive immigration reform,’ i.e., amnesty, ‘including a path to citizenship for those who have entered the country illegally. But they receive sharp — pointed — applause when they say illegals should ‘have to speak English’ before becoming citizens. When I asked Hillary Clinton about that, she said she’d noticed it too and added, ‘During the 1990s, I cannot remember being asked about immigration … Why? Because the economy was working … And average Americans didn’t have to go around looking for someone to blame.” Mrs. Clinton, who just had a royal screw-up with driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants in which she came out and admitted she is for amnesty, now claims that the only reason you and I are upset about illegal immigration is that the economy is bad, and that’s because we don’t have as many jobs as we would like to have, and so we gotta blame somebody for our economic malaise, and so we are blaming, because we are nativists and we’re racists and we’re bigots and we’re sexists and we’re homophobes, because we’re conservatives. That’s what they believe, we’re blaming illegal immigration.
Now, this whole piece by Klein is designed to illustrate how nobody understands why this is such a hot-button issue. Why don’t you just grant them the amnesty and move on? What is the big deal here? Huckabee doesn’t understand it. The Democrat candidates don’t understand it. Republicans don’t understand it, but nobody will be as honest about it as Huckabee when he admits he doesn’t know why it’s gotten so hot. Mrs. Clinton says it’s an issue of economics? I continue to be literally stunned at how tone deaf, despite all of the outpouring of sentiment, the expression of opinion by the American people en masse — I don’t care if it was during the amnesty vote and the phone calls to Washington or if it’s in presidential polls or issue polls — why they don’t see what this is really all about is beyond me. I can’t believe that they really don’t see what it’s all about. It is an issue of law. It’s about the rule of law. It is that simple. Plus, people have become sophisticated with the knowledge they’ve acquired over this to understand that both parties, and I think predominantly the Democrats, both parties are looking at these people as potential voters and to hell with whatever havoc they wreak on the culture and on the society and on the rule of law. If the people don’t get this issue, particularly the Democrats, it’s going to haunt them more than they can possibly imagine.