Opinion: Did immigration kill Chris Cannon’s career?
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Just when you thought it was safe to go back over the border...
Was Tuesday’s primary defeat of Rep. Chris Cannon (R-Utah) by challenger Jason Chaffetz a sign of something bigger? In what is said to be one of the Beehive State’s most conservative districts, six-term incumbent Cannon lost by a 60-40 vote. Were voters fed up with incumbents, fed up with the economy, or was it ... ¿inmigración?
Mickey Kaus (He’s not against immigrants! He’s just aware of them!) says it was Cannon’s insufficiently restrictive stances on immigration what done him in. ‘As if by eerie coincidence,’ Kaus writes, ‘John McCain has been having trouble generating the kind of popularity among Republicans typically enjoyed by Republican presidential candidates! And he’s also been pushing ‘comprehensive’ reform of late, potentially winning Latino support but further jeopardizing his GOP support.’
In Human Events, Marcus Epstein calls Cannon’s defeat ‘without a doubt, the greatest electoral victory of the immigration control movement. The election was about one -- and only one -- issue: Chris Cannon’s long support of amnesty for illegal aliens.’
The Salt Lake City Tribune calls Cannon the ‘congressman in the coalmine,’ and Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) tells the paper, ‘[A]ny Republican who’s running for office and believes the immigration issue is dead should take another look and see what happened to Mr. Cannon.’
On the other hand, Deseret News political editor Bob Bernick Jr. writes at length about Cannon’s defeat without mentioning immigration — but then that may just show that the MSM is in on the conspiracy.
The St. George Daily Spectrum also downplays immigration in the case, viewing the defeat as ‘a warning to incumbents as the 2008 campaign hits full stride.’
Michael Barone somewhat reframes his 2006 assessment that Cannon proved immigration was not political death for Republicans, but he doesn’t see the issue as fully scalable in the 2008 election: ‘What does this mean for immigration legislation in the next Congress? Not a lot. I thought that this would be the first presidential election in my memory in which the major party nominees would have sharply different positions on immigration. It would have been, had John McCain not won the Republican nomination.’
A definite maybe? Proof that the elites aren’t willing to speak the truth about immigration? And whose head will roll next?