Is Mitt Romney Planning To Debate Lou Dobbs Over Immigration?

It looks like Willard Romney is willing to spend another $44 million out of his own purse in the unending quest to put a Mormon in the White House. He and many other Mormon cultists actually spent $113,621,051 in pursuit of that goal last year. The $44 million was just what he spent out of the family cookie jar. He just sold his Utah ski lodge for around $5 million and is looking for another $3 million for a home he owns in suburban Boston-- which will leave the perennial candidate with a $10 million pad on the shore of Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire (site of the first presidential primary) and a $12 million beachfront compound in La Jolla, here in California, the state with the most electoral votes-- and the most Mormon voters-- yes even more than Utah!

The sale of the Utah and Boston homes has been described by political analysts as a way for Romney to prepare for another presidential race without having to explain why he owns excess real estate-- the issue that brought ridicule on rival Republican candidate John McCain last fall.

The home in the Boston suburbs is also a reminder of one of the low points in Romney's campaign-- the one when he was flip-floppin' all over the state about immigration policy, especially when it was discovered that he had been hiring cheap, undocumented, non-union labor to work on his grounds.

Of course, this is Mitt Romney we're talking about, so flip-floppin' is hardly something that has to be artificially inserted into any conversation. Going back to the immigration issue in fact, he's jumping from one side to the other-- again. His most recent strategy is to jump on the sunken SS Bush-McCain in regard to immigrants, i.e., the anti-Lou Dobbs position. He claims it will help attracted more minorities to the Party of Bigotry and Hatred. In an interview with The Hill he claimed "We have a natural affinity with Hispanic-American voters, Asian-American voters" and told them he believes "that one way to attract more minorities to the GOP is to pass immigration reform before the next election, saying the issue becomes demagogued by both parties on the campaign trail."

This could be extreme political repositioning, even for Romney.
As governor of a blue state, he once said he favored a sensible path to citizenship. Then came the 2008 presidential campaign. During primary season, Romney hammered - you could say demagogued - rivals like John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, and Mike Huckabee for being soft on illegal immigrants. As a national candidate, he embraced a ship-them-back-home, tough-guy approach, even after the Globe reported that he employed a landscaping company that relied on illegal Guatemalan immigrants to care for his own lawn. When US Representative Tom Tancredo of Colorado - who made a tough stand on illegal immigrants the centerpiece of his presidential campaign - dropped out of the race, he endorsed Romney.

How Romney gets beyond the flip-flop-flips of his multiple-choice positions on immigration and other issues is a mystery only he can solve.

But any edging back to a call for immigration reform illustrates a larger point.

Scapegoating immigrants was a losing strategy for Republicans in the 2008 presidential campaign; and Romney doesn't see it as a winning strategy in 2012.

Of course, he has to win a Republican primary first-- where the dominant Know Nothing base is so xenophobic that they'd probably all favor sending their grandparents and great grandparents back to wherever they came from at this point! Only 31% of Hispanics voted for McCain, down by 9% since Bush's 2004 race. Obama is working on serious solutions-- sure to be obstructed by the nuts and loons on the GOP fringe (the Bunnings and Burrs and Coburns and Cornyns and DeMints)-- and that will help bring that percentage down closer to the single digits where it belongs.

What a pathetic wretch; watch him say that the talk radio and the American public "went nuts":