Screw the Boos
02 December 2007 5:01 am by Taylor Marsh
Screw the Boos updated
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The Heartland Forum in Des Moines, IA certainly sounds like it was lively.
It seems some Democrats are willing to sacrifice the entire election on the
alter of abject stupidity. I, for one, am glad Clinton is not.
The senator was asked if she would “make a decision to give undocumented
immigrants a path to citizenship” during her first 100 days in office.
Clinton responded saying, “I have been favoring a plan to citizenship
for years. I voted for it in the Senate, I have spoke out about it around
Iowa and the country and in my campaign. And as president comprehensive immigration
reform will be a high priority for me.”Soft booing could be heard from the audience. The man repeated his question
about the first 100 days. Clinton replied, “Well you’ve to get congress
to pass the legislation and the president to do as much as possible, which
I will do.” Louder boos came from the crowd.
Pledging to provide a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants in the first
100 days?
I’m now convinced some primary voters in the Democratic party are willing to throw
the best chance of taking over the White House we’ve had in a long time. I’ve
never heard of anything so profoundly outrageous and so politically stupid.
Demanding a candidate pledge something so divisive get done within his or her
first 100 days is nothing short of general election suicide. Have people forgotten
what happened when Congress tried to get decent legislation passed over illegal
immigration? I have great hopes that we can bring illegal immigrants to a path
to citizenship during the next president’s first term, but demanding this pledge
is ridiculous.
This is not the first time Clinton refused to pander to her audience, taking
the boos from the faction before her; in this particular case as she talked
on the phone with them, due to weather conditions that prevented her from being
there in person. When Edwards challenged her at YearlyKos on accepting lobbying money
she refused to go his way.
Again, she was booed.
In front of a crowd that Clinton is committed to helping, she refused to tell
them what they wanted to hear. That the demand being made of Clinton was absurd
in the extreme and a sure loser in the general election is a no brainer. That
didn’t matter. News flash: nobody will get a pledge from a Republican on this
one. Oh, but by all means let’s make sure we hang ourselves out in the breeze on a sure loser.
It doesn’t matter how strongly we all want to solve the illegal immigration
challenge. There will be a long, slow fight to get it done and we won’t get
it done by making 100 day pledges that incites Americans on all sides of the
political spectrum. It’s just staggeringly stupid.
Good for Clinton.
UPDATE: Ben Smith has some video/audio. Obama evidently bused in a contingent to the Brown and Black forum.
The group, despite the Iowa location of this event, appears to have brought a large portion of the couple thousand people here from Chicago (they keep cheering at the mention of the city, and the Gamaliel Foundation, for which Obama was once an organizer, chartered two buses) and the questions are heavily focused on issues related to immigration, punctuated by the occasional chant of “Si se puede.”
