By SETH BARNES barne-
IT’S NOT ESPECIALLY HARD TO FOLLOW political news in our country. You just have to pay attention to the letter “I.”
A tidbit I gleaned from Bob Woodward’s “State of Denial,” the comprehensive exploration of the stubborn ineptitude of the Bush White House in the face of planning and executing the war in Iraq, was outgoing Chief of Staff Andrew Card’s words to his replacement, Josh Bolten, in April of 2006. The agenda will consist of “... Iraq, Iraq, Iraq,” Card told Bolten. Well, if he’d added an “immigration” and “incompetence” in there he might have had it completely. Incompetency inside and outside of our borders, like dual tight ends on a football line.
I’m now reading Walter Isaacson’s new biography on Albert Einstein. You know, so I could finally observe the flowering of some genius in the face of the world’s most difficult and intractable problems.
Iraq has, with good reason, blown the immigration debate off the front pages in the first months of 2007. Just as the stem cell debate in the summer of 2001 now looks quaint stacked up against the terror of 9/11, the great immigration debate of 2006 looks somewhat paltry next to the escalating deterioration in the Middle East. Nonetheless, illegal immigration has once again raised its head above the sand for a brief spell, and if nothing else, it’s a nice opportunity to look at how compromise can produce as much laughably absurd policy as the blustery unilateralism that poisoned the United States’ drive to war.
In the recent Republican presidential debate held in New Hampshire, Rudy Giuliani called the plan being debated in the Senate “a typical Washington mess,” which pretty much hits the nail on the head. John McCain, the only candidate to openly support the measure said, “What we have done is what you expect us to do, my friends, and that’s come together with the president of the United States, the leader of our party, Democrat and Republican, conservative Republicans like Jon Kyl, Johnny Isakson, Saxby Chambliss and Trent Lott, and sit down and figure out an approach to this problem.”
“A typical washington mess,” — In the recent republican presidential debate held in new hampshire, rudy giuliani called the plan being debated in the senate which pretty much hits the nail on the head
If nothing else, McCain lives up to his reputation as a straight shooter. He’s willing to say that this is a broken idea, an impractical mishmash of ideologies, but it’s all those Washington folks have got for us at the moment. What else could we expect?
In planning and carrying out the war, the president suffered from a lack of compromise and openness to alternative ways of thinking. With immigration reform, the policy suffers from trying to appease the right wing wack-jobs who can’t face the realities of a country that depends on immigrant labor as a part of its economy, a country that already has an influx of millions of illegals. The solution to this is bureaucracy. Monitoring, tracking, verification, reams of government agency red tape and documentation. The right wants to paperwork the problem to death. Current illegals living and working in the country have to hit a number of financial and cultural benchmarks just to maintain their status quo. Where’s their incentive to cooperate going to come from? How is the slow-moving behemoth of bureaucracy known as the U.S. government actually going to actually act on this?
“The special path” for now undocumented workers is “especially hard. It’s 8 to 13 years,” McCain assures us. Does that sound realistic?
Immigration, Iraq, Incompetence. One of the main thrusts of Isaacson’s book on Einstein is that he tackled unique problems of space and time that hadn’t been previously explored in great depth. His genius wasn’t so much in the execution of his thinking to solve known problems. It was in the range and variety of his curiosity that allowed him to see beyond the limited scope hampering his colleagues from seeing the truth as it actually existed.
The path to solving exceptional problems sometimes demands more than a compromise or an assertion of a set of individual beliefs. Sometimes an exceptional perspective, a new way of thinking about old problems, is required.
Some kind of exceptional perspective would make for a better read on the two “I” issues. But I’m not going to hold my breath as the final chapters are written.
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on June 7, 2007. Read the original PDF.