Obama holds important immigration meeting with … Latino celebrities

Yesterday’s White House agenda: Slamming the media for focusing on nonsense when there are serious problems to be solved. Today’s White House agenda: Baiting the media with nonsense to distract from the fact that he refuses to solve this serious problem.

He should have used this tactic in lieu of replying to Paul Ryan’s budget proposal. “Today in the East Room: A candlelight vigil to mourn the death of Medicare with Andy Griffith, Wilford Brimley, and Betty White.”

“The President wants a constructive and civil debate on the need to fix the broken immigration system so that it meets America’s economic and security needs for the 21st century,” a White House official said in a statement. “To do that we need to elevate the debate, and folks like these and those who met with him last week can play an important part in bringing this debate around the country, rising above the politics and false debates that too often dominate when the issue comes up, and really address why it matters economically and for other reasons in a constructive way.”…

The White House official said today’s meeting was similar to the one the president held behind closed doors last week, on Tuesday, April 19, with a bipartisan group of individuals from the faith, law enforcement, and business communities…

An attendee of the meeting last week told National Journal that President Obama seemed focused on political strategy, not policy, telling the roughly 60 individuals in the meeting that he wanted to create conditions under which Congress could act to push a comprehensive bill. The president ended the meeting by promising to devote as much time and energy to the issue as he had to the health care law.

Then everybody laughed and promised to vote for him anyway. (Just kidding — or am I?) Attendees at today’s meeting included Eva Longoria and Rosario Dawson; attendees at last week’s meeting included Schwarzenegger and, er, Al Sharpton. The point here, of course, is to give the media an excuse to reassure disgruntled progressives/amnesty shills that Obama’s very, very serious about this issue even though he’s unwilling to pursue the sort of two-step “enforcement first” policy which, realistically, is the only way an eventual amnesty will ever happen. If O wins reelection and, as expected, the GOP picks up a bunch of Senate seats next year, maybe that’s something Democrats will finally be willing to consider in his second term. He’ll be a lame duck and there’ll be even more Blue Dogs whose seats are up in 2014, so there’s an outside chance at 60 votes for a GOP-type plan. After all, he has no compunction about stabbing core constituencies in the back. Ask any liberal who opposes the Bush tax cuts, keeping Gitmo open, or new wars in the Middle East.

Exit question: He really just wanted to meet Eva Longoria, didn’t he? I shall cast no stone from the porch of my glass house.

• Bobby Jindal: Paternalistic, big-government liberalism is the biggest loser here
• Chris Christie: “I’ll be here to welcome” Obama when he comes to tour the NJ coast again next week
• MSNBC consensus: Obama’s speech was historic, amazing, “one of the best of his presidency”

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