Obama's Broken Immigration Clock

[Geee]

American Spectator:

President Obama was better than usual, but not as good as he should have been, during a speech about immigration policy reform he gave in El Paso on Tuesday afternoon. (Text of speech here.)

He correctly noted that the current immigration system is broken, that we train our own competition, break up families, and generally do ourselves no favors with the status quo. He also said -- and I agree -- that immigration reform is "an economic imperative."

He gave better lip service than usual to the important point that illegals are illegal, and that people who broke the law to come here or stay here should not be rewarded, not least because of how unfair it is to people who wait years to do it the right way.

Being who he is, Obama couldn't help but toss in a couple of jabs against the Republicans, stupidly making it far too transparent that his push on this issue is at least as much due to electoral politics as to actually caring about policy. Like the scorpion in the fable, it's just his nature.

So why the big push now? Because Obama knows his support among white voters -- at least outside of college-educated white women -- has cratered (but not because of their color, mind you) and because he believes with good reason that even blacks won't be as motivated to vote as they were in the "historic" 2008 election. After all, black turnout dropped from about 13% of voters in 2006, the last non-presidential election, to 10% in 2010 while overall voter turnout rose about 1%.