Dan Henninger nails it!
The October Surprise Arrives
The politics of the migrant caravan sound a lot like the Kavanaugh nomination fiasco.
By Daniel Henninger
Oct. 24, 2018 7:06 p.m. ET
It looks as if the 2018 election’s October Surprise is about to arrive—from Honduras.
There they are—all 7,000 or so of them meandering across Mexico, on television 24/7 and the front pages every day. Unavoidably, everyone is forced to shape an opinion about it. Unavoidably, it’s political.
Most media coverage runs on two joined tracks. One, the caravan is a human tragedy. Two, Donald Trump and the Republicans are, needless to say, on the wrong political side of the tragedy.
Does this sound familiar?
That’s right,
the October Surprise in its media and political particulars sounds similar to the September Surprise—the Kavanaugh nomination hearings.
The Senate Judiciary Democrats dropped the Christine Blasey Ford bombshell late in the process to drive a wedge between Republicans and female voters.
It backfired.
The Democrats reduced all the complexities of a Supreme Court nomination to mandatory expressions of sympathy for a human tragedy. For many Americans, as summarized on the Senate floor by Sen. Susan Collins, the Democratic effort to force her and the rest of the country into making this impossible Sophie’s Choice was just too much. Due process still matters.
The left’s reductionist Kavanaugh strategy enraged and energized a sleepy Republican electorate, whose interest in the midterms now effectively matches the Democrats’.
Early voting patterns are fickle as a predictor of final results, but the consistency of the trend reported this week by NBC News and TargetSmart is striking. Early voting by GOP-affiliated voters is running ahead of Democrats in seven key states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Montana, Tennessee and Texas. Early-voting Democrats lead only in Nevada. This pattern is the opposite of assumptions about relative levels of enthusiasm.
Another tea-leafy metric associated with midterm election outcomes is presidential approval. In early September, when Democrats were involved in the normal phase of the Kavanaugh hearings, President Trump’s approval average on Real Clear Politics was at its lowest level since March—40.6%. On Sept. 18, simultaneous with the nation’s daily doses of Ford versus Kavanaugh, Mr. Trump’s approval began to climb. It now sits at a 44.1% average. It just hit 47% in the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.
Now come the Hondurans. The Senate Judiciary Democrats didn’t create the caravan, though a query about who did to Dianne Feinstein’s staff couldn’t hurt. Whoever on the international left put up the money, Democrats in tight re-election races—say, Claire McCaskill in Missouri or Joe Donnelly in Indiana—have to be asking: Whose idea was this?
Conventional wisdom would hold that a migrant wave landing on the U.S. border around Election Day would revive the public-relations debacle the Trump administration endured with the family-separation mess in Texas this summer.
Nor is any effort being spared this week to convey the impression that
just as the Republicans last month were anti-woman, this month they’re anti-immigrant.
Here is the headline the
New York Times ran atop its front-page story/editorial Tuesday: “Trump Escalates Use of Migrants as Election Ploy. Stoking Voters’ Anxiety With Baseless Tale of Ominous Caravan.” Or the
Washington Post’s front page the same day: “For Trump and GOP, a bet on fear, falsehoods.”
Is a sitting president, two weeks from a midterm election and probable Democratic control of the House, exploiting this event for political ends? Well golly gee, and welcome to Mayberry, Aunt Bee. For the truly faint of heart, we’d also note Mr. Trump’s ethanol-usage payoff to corn farmers this month.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, the Honduran caravan is the Kavanaugh nomination all over again. (A second one with thousands is forming now in Guatemala.) It’s a massive event that forces voters to think about immigration, an issue Democrats thought had been weaponized this summer against Republicans.
To borrow an old Marx Brothers joke, the question about the caravan for voters is:
Who are you going to believe, media or your own eyes? Tens of millions of Americans have been staring for a week at the images of this caravan and asking: What exactly are we expected to do when it arrives in Texas?
Amid his hyperbolic commentary, Mr. Trump has said one indisputably non-false thing:
Our immigration laws are “a disgrace.” And the responsibility for that disgrace, back at least to the 1980s, is bipartisan.
This summer’s media-drenched family-separation fiasco taught a lot of people, if nothing else, that the federal bureaucracies simply cannot process this volume of people who just, you know, show up.
The Democratic left’s well-publicized answer to that complex, overwhelmingly difficult reality is twofold:
Create sanctuary cities and abolish ICE—U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. In other words, do less than nothing.
Amid whatever is “normal” in our politics anymore, voters have had to process two overwhelming pre-election events: the Kavanaugh nomination and now these migrant caravans heading toward the U.S. With each, the
Democrats reduced their political proposition for voters to just one thing: We care. For a lot of people, I suspect, saying only that you care won’t be sufficient reason to earn their vote.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-oct...ves-1540422382
<---How many illegal aliens can live in a 1200 sq. ft. house anyway? We should ask WTF...
