Obama: No more Mr. Nice Guy

By Max J. Castro
majcastro@gmail.com

President Barack Obama scored a political slam-dunk against the Republicans last week. He did by announcing that the United States would no longer deport immigrants who were brought here as children by their undocumented parents. The move will benefit almost a million people and earn Obama the eternal gratitude of many more of their family members and maximize his already strong support in the Latino community.

It was the kind of surprise, in-your-face shot with an exclamation point at the end that only true superstars can perform. Michael Jordan, who used to play for the president’s beloved Chicago Bulls basketball team long before Obama dreamt of the White House and lived in the Windy City, could do it. The Miami Heat’s LeBron James, now starring in the finals of National Basketball Association (NBA), can do it.

But Obama, who was good enough to play on his high school’s varsity team and still plays in informal games, has scored no political dunks on the GOP. At best, he has scored a precious few difficult jump shots – the watered-down stimulus bill and the similarly diluted health care reform law, the slow motion, tortuous end of discrimination against gays in the military, and the Lilly Ledbetter Act, a law passed only because Democrats controlled Congress, that makes it more difficult for employers to discriminate against women. But this time he slammed it through and through, by executive order, with no attempt to please or placate the Republicans, to reason with the unreasonable. Obama just rammed the thing through. He reamed them. This time the Republicans could not obstruct, only object, belatedly and without recourse. How sweet it is.  

It is refreshing to have a president who not only plays golf like almost every other president but who also can make a shot from three-point range – on the first try, in front of a big gathering of military personnel, and without the ball even grazing the iron. Golf is the favorite game of the rich and flabby, although not exclusively. None other than Che Guevara enjoyed the sport.

Basketball is the game of the black ghetto, where it is played hard. But in three years plus Obama has been unable to make the kind of dominating moves necessary to penetrate the Republican defense, admittedly a defense so dirty that all the GOP players would have fouled out in the first quarter if only politics had referees. It is always a costly mistake to play a clean game with thugs, as Obama tried. What he needed was to bring soul back into his play.

This week, finally, he did. He lifted the sword of Damocles hanging perilously over a generation of promising young people who until then had been facing deportation for the crime of being brought to this country as minors by their undocumented immigrant parents.

It is the right thing to do as public policy, it is good for the U.S. economy long-term, and it’s justified on humanitarian and moral grounds. It was also a brilliant move to the basket, which virtually ensures the overwhelming vote of Latinos, a crucial constituency, in this year’s presidential election.

The exclamation point after the dunk is that it puts Mitt Romney and the Republicans between a rock and a hard place. Of all the Republican candidates who vied for the nomination, none was more consistently hostile to immigrants than Romney. With few exceptions, GOP members of Congress have been even more virulent on the topic, a redoubtable feat.

The headache for Republicans is that, according to most analysts, Romney needs about 40 percent of the Latino vote to win. Polls before the latest Obama play on immigration showed Romney wasn’t even close to that number. Now it would take a major miracle for Romney to come anywhere near 40 percent.

What is Romney to do? He can’t do a 180-degree turn for the umpteenth time because that would anger not only Tea Party types but many other xenophobes in his party. It would also be the definitive proof that Romney is a serial flip-flopper, a chameleon who changes positions according to political convenience. And he would gain almost no support in the Latino community. His fourth-quarter conversion would not be believed and it would be seen as too little and too late.

Just as it seemed that Barack Obama would have a very hard time winning the world’s biggest championship because the U.S. economy teeters on the edge of another full-blown recession, the president upped his game. He came up with a move for which Romney has no defense. He cannot agree with Obama nor can he go on the offensive by lambasting the decision (and thereby arousing the Latino community to oppose him even more massively) or by proposing his own program because he has long set in stone his attitude toward immigration.

Essentially, then, Romney is up the creek without a paddle, and Obama put him there. A June 17 Washington Post story is apropos: “Romney criticizes Obama’s immigration plan but declines to offer alternative.” The Post reports that “…the presumptive Republican nominee said that if he were elected president he would seek a permanent “long-term solution” regarding the citizenship status of immigrant kids who go on to be law-abiding residents. Romney criticized Obama’s policy as a ‘stop-gap measure,’ but he did not say what his alternative solution would entail, other than to provide permanent residency to those who serve in the military.”

We know full well, straight from the horse’s mouth, what Romney’s “permanent solution” is: “self-deportation.” That’s another way of saying making life so miserable for undocumented immigrants so that they “choose” to leave on their own. Such language is Orwellian doublespeak. And those words, permanent (as in final), solution (who is the problem?), and deportation are words we have heard before, and they are chilling.

Romney is no crypto-Nazi, but his position on immigration has been clear for a long time. Not only did he Romney opposed the Dream Act, which would have offered a comprehensive solution in the form of a path to citizenship, which Obama supports but is barred from enacting by executive order. He even declined to support a weak version of the Dream Act thought up by right-wing darling Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio in an effort to make the Republican Party more palatable to Latinos. Although he is trying his best to muddy the waters, Romney can’t pull it off this time.

Will the nation’s new demographic balance trump the blame heaped on any presidential incumbent whenever and wherever the economy is bad? That question is impossible to answer with the final series far from over. What is clear is that Obama made the most muscular play possible against the Republicans, and it will cost the GOP dearly at the ballot box. But will it be enough?