Why Obama Must Go to the Border Immediately
The president has to go to the border.
I know all the arguments against it. It’s a photo-op. It won’t help. He will get no credit—let alone any cooperation—from the vandals in the Congress for having done so. He will not even get the $3.7 billion the country needs to cope with the present crisis, let alone any movement on comprehensive immigration reform. He will get no credit for demonstrating even the outer trappings of “leadership.” The flying monkeys will howl all the louder that it is a political stunt, and that he should have done it sooner, and (in essence) that he personally should have intervened back in 2008, when lame duck C-Plus Augustus signed the well-intentioned law that is at the root of the current crisis.
Perhaps the current president should have leaped across the desk and knocked the pen from his predecessor’s hand. And, at the more shadowy end of things, I understand completely the genuine security concerns that would arise if this particular president of the United States were to show up in an area that may soon be bristling with armed yahoos. I understand all of that. I don’t care.
The president has to go to the border.
Because that’s what presidents do.
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