Originally published December 27 2005
CNN profiles Bush Administration's 2005 downfall
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger, NaturalNews Editor
CNN.com looks back on the year the Bush Administration has suffered through and predicts possible consequences for the future of the Republican party, if the President doesn't come up with a winning issue.
Even Karl Rove's aura of imperturbability began to melt, not only because he is under investigation in the CIA-leak case but also -- and more gravely for the GOP -- because for once he seemed unable to find a winning issue for his boss.
Which is why it's curious and even a little dangerous for the White House to have picked immigration as the issue to planish a presidency's rough edges.
Few issues divide Bush's party so much, yet this week the President plans to launch an extensive bully-pulpit campaign on immigration.
He is scheduled to travel with Senator John McCain, who with Senator Edward Kennedy has co-written a bill that would give millions of illegal immigrants the chance to earn citizenship.
That would enrage GOP conservatives who believe the U.S. should secure its borders and deport illegal aliens, not reward them.
Like any good politician, Bush will try to play both sides.
As recently as January 2004, Bush used his first policy announcement of that re-election year to unveil a guest-worker program that would allow illegal immigrants to obtain legal status for at least six years if they have a job and their employer vouches for them.
In June, two months after a citizens' group called the Minuteman Project began vigilante patrols of the Mexican border, Bush told lawmakers he had not understood how important border security was to his base.
That's why Bush is calling this week for a series of border-security measures that will make his guest-worker plan look like an afterthought in his immigration policy.
The President is expected to equate border security with national security, connecting the issue to that part of his image that until recently had been robust.
If his big effort on immigration ends in a stalemate--which is quite possible, since House Republicans lean more conservative on this issue and Senate Republicans, more liberal--Bush would yet again look weak.
So far, he has not been able to bridge his party's business leaders, who need a steady supply of workers willing to do hard labor, and its cultural conservatives, who fear that something essential about the American character is vanishing under the crosscurrents of multilingualism and demographic change and ethnic pluralism.
"We've increased [border enforcement] by $20 billion in the last 10 years, and the problem is worse today."
But the Democrats have had no more success than the Republicans at divining a policy that will reassure both Latino voters and those who worry that illegal immigrants are unfairly taking jobs and social services.
Still, there is nothing more appropriate for a politician trying to redefine himself than to be asked to define what his country is.
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