Mudcat Love
by digby
It’s clear that Chris Matthews sees the immigration issue as another opportunity to crawl up the GOP codpiece and prove his manly manliness. Yesterday he not only had that silly Dukes of Hazard caricature Mudcat “I call ’em illegal aliens” Saunders on, he said this:
MATTHEWS: Well, the fact is, Bob, it’s not just — and Kate — it’s not just Republicans who don’t like illegal immigration. Seventy-one percent of the country say it’s their number one concern. They want to stop illegal immigration. These are regular Americans. They’re not right-wingers. And they think we ought to have a border.
I don’t know how many times this guy has to twist poll numbers before someone calls a doctor and has him tested for some sort of cognitive disorder. Media Matters corrects this massively ill informed bullshit:
Matthews was apparently distorting a March 10-13 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that found that 71 percent of respondents would be “more likely … to vote for a candidate for Congress” who “[f]avors tighter controls on illegal immigration.”
In a March 9-12 CBS News poll, 4 percent of respondents identified immigration as “the most important problem facing this country today.” And a January 26-29 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found that 9 percent of respondent thought that illegal immigration “should be the top priority for the federal government.”
I’m sure that with all the legislation, hysterical coverage and massive protests that it has become “number one” to more people lately, but I will be very surprised if it comes even close to being the number one issue any time soon. This country has a lot of problems.
Matthews could have illuminated this debate if he had noted that according to the latest Democracy Corps poll, the single most important foreign policy issue is globalization and outsourcing. It’s more important than terrorism and Iraq. I found that surprising. It explains why there is so much anxiety over immigration right now. The threat of cheap foreign labor is very real to people, they feel powerless to stop it, and the most immediate face of it is low wage Latino migration to the US.
The forces shaping this are massive and it cannot be finessed by crude nativist rhetoric no matter how much people want to run populist campaigns and are tempted to pull out that well-worn playbook. The sharp feelings about immigration right now are a symptom of something much bigger and dislocating than latino day laborers — and it seems that on some level, the public knows it. It’s possible that politicians can cynically divert voters’ angst over globalization by stoking anti-immigrant fervor, but it appears to me that it would be a short term solution at best. Deporting every illegal immigrant and putting up a 25 foot wall won’t solve this problem. Globalization will continue apace, people will still want to buy massive quantities of cheap disposable stuff and working people are going to be squeezed.
Matthews is a simpleton as we all know, and often misstates basic facts. But he and his new idol Mudcat (who Chris practically blew right on camera)are talking a very aggressive short game with immigration and it’s more irritating than usual. I sincerely hope that he is not parroting the establishment CW he’s hearing over cocktail weenies or this issue is going to turn into a xenophobic free for all and leave the real issues that are making Americans uneasy about immigration unaddressed — just as the corporate establishment hopes it does.
Update: I just watched Matthews say that 90% of Americans in small towns in California are upset because “they didn’t move to Mexico, Mexico moved to them.” “Americans” have had it up to here with Mexican culture, apparently.
It was even too much for Hugh Hewitt, wingnut extraordinaire, who happens to be from Orange County once the most conservative region in California. His home town, Santa Ana, has a 76% Latino population. Hewitt, as a California Republican, knows very well that it is political suicide to make such blatant, xenophobic arguments and he wanted nothing to do with them.
I think it is EXTREMELY important, for this as well as many other reasons, that we make it very, very clear that Chris Matthews is not a Democrat. He’s a Republican:
MATTHEWS: People go to vote this November, you know this as well. When I go to vote, I know who my congressperson is. And I always voted for this woman out in Maryland for years, because I know her and like her, a moderate Republican. I always voted for her. Then if I knew somebody running against her personally, I’d vote for them.
It’s the way I look at a lot of the elections. I think Bush is OK the first time, then he changed I thought, so I didn‘t like him the second time. I‘m a thinker about this. Or do people just vote the party who my parents voted.
He’s a thinker, all right. A Republican thinker.
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