America’s already feeling the pain of Obama’s reelection

Kroft has been so insistent on not making news that after his post-Benghazi interview with Obama his producers cut footage of the president continuing to suggest that the assault on the U.S. consulate might have been something other than a planned terrorist attack. The president “knows we’re not going to play gotcha with him,” said Kroft, who made his name playing gotcha with used car salesmen and crooked lawyers, after the Obama-Clinton segment. Try picturing Kroft saying the same thing about President Romney.

There is also the question of priorities. The U.S. economy has been sagging for years, the deficit is vast, and entitlement programs are not prepared to handle the coming retirement of the Baby Boomers, so naturally President Obama’s top legislative priority is amnestying 11 million illegal immigrants. This would not have been high on President Romney’s agenda. But at least one can understand Obama’s logic. For him amnesty is, dare one say it, a gift to the Hispanic voters he credits with his reelection.

What is the GOP’s excuse? Immigration is not the public’s foremost concern. Nor is it at all clear that Hispanic voters prefer Democrats simply on the basis of amnesty. George W. Bush and John McCain both supported amnesty, and neither won the Hispanic vote. Hispanic support for George H.W. Bush cratered after the last amnesty in 1986. There is plenty of evidence to suggest that Hispanics vote for Democrats because they agree with the Democratic agenda of taxing the rich and redistributing the money to the middle class and poor. Will amnesty change that? It strains credulity to assume Republicans would somehow benefit politically from colluding in the passage of Obama’s top goal. The president, not the junior senator from Florida, gets the credit—and the blame—for all that happens in Washington. Immigration reform is no exception.