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Former Rep. Nathan Deal is putting illegal immigration front and center in his bid for governor of Georgia, targeting the issue in his first television ad unveiled just hours after the Justice Department filed suit against Arizona’s strict anti-illegal immigration law.
“Liberals won’t like it when I empower local law enforcement to help deport illegal aliens,” Deal says in the ad. “But it must be done, because the federal government has failed to secure our borders and illegal aliens are costing Georgia taxpayers over a billion dollars every single year.”
Deal has already made illegal immigration a theme of his primary campaign, inviting the White House in an earlier news release to “sue us too” over a proposed crackdown. In his debut commercial, Deal boasts that he “wrote the law to stop illegal aliens from receiving taxpayer-funded health care.”
Battling for second place in Republican primary polls, Deal is hoping to make it into a runoff with the current GOP front-runner, state Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine. A poll released last week showed Oxendine and former Georgia Secretary of State Karen Handel tied for first place.
Seen by comparison from California, Georgia voters look very fortunate to have a decent candidate for governor. But the Golden State suffers from a number of difficulties that impede the political process, including unwieldy size, demographic change, the nation’s worst adult illiteracy, poor reporting of state politics and the prohibitive cost of running for statewide office. The dysfunction is exemplified by the fact that the Republican candidate has never held office voted rarely at best, but is prepared to spend $150 million of her own money to become governor.
The immigration policy page on her campaign website promises that a Gov. Whitman would eliminate sanctuary cities, pursue workplace enforcement, prohibit the dispensing of drivers licenses to illegal aliens, defend English immersion in schools and recoup prison costs from the feds, among other things.
But now that the general election beckons, Whitman thinks she can checkbook her way into hispanic support. She has already spent over $71 million of her own money just to win the primary, and is now making Spanish media more wealthy, including very expensive ads running during the World Cup soccer tournament.
Meg Whitman launched two ads on Spanish-language television stations Thursday, part of an effort to woo Latino voters turned off by the Republican gubernatorial nominee’s tough talk about illegal immigration during the GOP primary.
One of the ads highlights Whitman’s opposition to a controversial Arizona law that compels police to check the immigration status of those stopped on suspicion of a crime. It also says Whitman opposed Proposition 187, the 1994 California ballot measure that would have denied taxpayer-funded services to illegal immigrants. The other focuses on jobs and the economy.
When asked by reporters, Whitman has consistently expressed her opposition to Proposition 187 and to the Arizona law, which became an issue during the closing weeks of the primary.
But she did not broadcast those stances in tens of millions of dollars in ads in her primary battle against Steve Poizner, who made illegal immigration a central issue. Instead, Whitman’s ads emphasized that she would be “tough as nails” on illegal immigrants, and condemned amnesty, sanctuary cities and some taxpayer benefits.
“Illegal immigrants are just that, illegal,” she said in an ad that featured her campaign chairman, former Gov. Pete Wilson.
Wilson is viewed as a pariah by many in the Latino community because he was the most visible supporter of Proposition 187. In a recent Los Angeles Times- USC poll, only 16% of Latinos felt favorably toward him.
Strategists say Whitman, a billionaire who has put $91 million of her personal wealth into her campaign, must secure substantial support among Latinos if she hopes to prevail over Democrat Jerry Brown in November.
“Unless she gets over one-third of the Latino vote, I don’t care how much she spends, she’s not going to win,” said Allan Hoffenblum, a former Republican consultant who publishes the California Target Book. “She was pushed further to the right on that issue than she wanted to go, but the one key thing she remained steadfast on, even though she whispered it during the primary, was that she opposed the Arizona law.”
Whitman would do better to forget about hispandering and support law and borders without apology. Opposing Arizona on immigration enforcement is not a vote-getter among the majority population, who continue to support the state according to every mainstream poll.
Below, a Whitman ad in the language of the invader — for “una nueva California”!
It is hard to avoid the immigration catastrophe in California, the state most affected by open borders and lackluster enforcement. But politicians don’t want to talk about it because they would rather avoid the aggravation of well funded Raza-types attacking over insignificant trifles.
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger supported Prop 187 in 1994 before he had political stars in his eyes. But when he spoke as an immigrant himself and recommended to Hispanics that they make more effort to assimilate, the Raza gang beat him bloody. By last summer, the Governator was so enfeebled that he defended illegal aliens ( Schwarzenegger: Don’t blame state budget deficit on illegal immigrants).
Still, a shred of representative government remains, and the desire of citizens for the anarchy to end has never gone away, despite occasional pronouncements of elite pundits that the issue is not longer relevant. And the terrible unemployment in California (12.8% in February), now three points above the national level, cannot be ignored.
So immigration has become an important campaign issue for the Republican gubernatorial candidates. Steve Poizner ran the first immigration ad (below) and it must have had positive results, because he ran a follow-up slamming Meg Whitman as favoring amnesty, just like President Obama.
Meg Whitman had just finished delivering her campaign stump speech for an El Dorado Hills audience several months ago when she asked for questions from the crowd.
Two words, phrased as a statement, were the first to pop from the audience of about 30 people: “Illegal aliens.”
The Republican gubernatorial hopeful didn’t miss a beat, promising to get tough on employers of such immigrants and otherwise stop the influx.
That scene has played out countless times on the campaign trail this year, where illegal immigration has remained a hot topic for many state Republicans, even as – or perhaps because – unemployment and other economic worries have grown.
Republican candidates have responded by staking out tough positions on the subject, and Whitman rival Steve Poizner, in particular, has built much of his campaign on pledging to cut state services for all illegal immigrants.
“My view is we should not have any magnets left,” Poizner said last month at the state Republican convention. “We should turn off all incentives. We should end all taxpayer benefits for people here illegally.”
That illegal immigration has stayed in the spotlight 16 years after state voters voted to do exactly what Poizner was suggesting wasn’t a surprise for Jon Fleischman, who’s the vice chairman of the state GOP’s southern branch and a popular blogger.
In the most recent nonpartisan Field Poll, 58 percent of registered state Republican voters called illegal immigration one of their most important issues, just below economic and state budget concerns. A larger percentage of voters identifying themselves as strong conservatives listed illegal immigration as a most important issue. By contrast, just 27 percent of Democrats and 7 percent of strong liberals cited the issue as one of their most important.
“It’s an issue of principle for Republicans,” Fleischman said. “No matter what discussion you have – jail overcrowding, California prison costs, the schools – it’s in there.” Continue reading this article
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It didn’t take long for the blond billionaire to flip-flop. In California’s