Arizona suit imperils Western Dems

The Obama administration's lawsuit over the stringent Arizona border law might have just made the incline a little steeper for many Western Democrats, providing instant fodder to Republicans who are already optimistic about regaining ground lost over the last two election cycles.

The dust from the Department of Justice lawsuit filed Tuesday is just starting to settle, but the reflexive sense among strategists on both sides is that it will be a net negative for Democrats this fall.

The suit could, of course, help boost turnout among Hispanic voters in key areas across the West. And stridently anti-immigrant rhetoric could turn off independent voters. Yet many foresee a midterm electorate featuring an energized Republican base — for whom the immigration issue has emerged as a priority — prompting moderate white Western voters who are concerned about jobs to decamp to the GOP at least in the short term, political observers said.

“This is a tough issue for Democrats,” said former Colorado Gov. Dick Lamm, a Democrat who is co-director of the Institute for Public Policy Studies at the University of Denver. “Politically, I just can’t think of any place in the West where this is going to play well.”

"If you look like you're siding with illegal immigration, you're in trouble," said one national Republican strategist, adding that when it comes to the discussion of secured borders, "people think that's what should happen."

While the suit could prove helpful to President Barack Obama by revving up his own base in 2012 — and, by extension, prove harmful to Republicans that year because they risk offending a key and growing segment of the electorate — the near-term impact is a different matter.

One GOP strategist compared it to the ads Republican Pete Wilson ran in 1994 in California as he was trailing in the polls for his gubernatorial reelection bid on Proposition 187, the state's tough-as-nails immigration ballot option that roiled Latino voters for a generation — but won him his seat for another term.

"Those ads hurt him moving forward, but that's what won him the election," the strategist added.

Wes Gullett, an Arizona political strategist and a former longtime aide to Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), said the lawsuit was “manna from heaven” for Republicans.

“Obviously, the White House is tone-deaf on Western politics,” said Gullett, who noted he personally opposes the law. “While a lot of people wish that our law wouldn’t go into effect, for the administration to sue on this is crazy. It is just a complete political loser.”

Republicans have failed in recent years to turn the anger towards illegal immigration into a winning election issue, Lamm said, but this year could be different.

“This is an issue that is boiling, and it is not one that is going to be a happy outcome for Democrats,” said Lamm, who favors tougher immigration and border enforcement policies.

The White House pre-empted the suit —which it insisted it had no immediate role in — with a sweeping speech last week in which President Obama talked up the need for "comprehensive reform" and a bipartisan fix.

But the speech got little by way of traction, and didn't do much to offset the political dangers for Democrats dealing up close with an immigration law that has the support of nearly 60 percent of Arizonans.

At least three Arizona Democrats saw trouble they could face in November, and broached the topic with the White House well in advance of the court filing, which the administration first announced last month.

Three House Democrats who are all facing tough reelection fights — Reps. Ann Kirkpatrick, Harry Mitchell and Gabrielle Giffords — asked the Obama administration last month to ditch any planned court battle, saying legal maneuvering isn't going to fix a system that's widely seen as broken.

Kirkpatrick on Tuesday called the suit “a sideshow, distracting us from the real task at hand.”

“A court battle between the federal government and Arizona will not move us closer to securing the border or fixing America’s broken immigration system," the freshman lawmaker said in a statement.

“Washington failed us on this issue again today, and Arizonans have had enough. ...” she added. “Our law enforcement and communities are at risk right now — this is a time for solutions, not new obstacles.”

Mitchell, who was elected 2006, said he was disappointed by the lawsuit, calling it “the wrong way to go.”

“Arizonans are tired of the grandstanding. Political posturing on this issue has to end,” he said.

Republicans, meanwhile, seized on the suit as more evidence that Washington has gone soft on the issue and abdicated it role in securing the border.

“There is a perception that the president is not only out of touch but really asleep at the wheel,” Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) told POLITICO.

Franks is among the many GOPers who have urged the president to visit the border.

“I don’t have confidence it would change [Obama’s] mind, but it might go a long way toward demonstrating his arrogance-to-competency ratio is not as catastrophically out of balance as it appears to be.”

Franks was one of 20 House Republicans who signed a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder on Tuesday taking the administration to task for filing suit over the Arizona law and ignoring the broader illegal immigration problem.

Both sides of the issue are well aware that, in every survey since Republican Gov. Jan Brewer signed the bill into law, voters have shown support for the measure, which greatly complicates the situation for Democrats. Now, at a minimum, they’ll spend what should be a relatively sleepy stretch of summer months defending themselves on a wedge issue.

A May national survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found 73 percent of Americans support requiring people to produce papers verifying their legal status if police ask for them.

In Colorado, home to a competitive Senate and gubernatorial race this fall and several vulnerable House Democrats, a Denver Post/9News Poll conducted last month showed even 62 percent of Colorado Hispanic voters — roughly the same percentage as white voters (61 percent) — would favor their state implementing a law similar to the one in Arizona.

Brewer has also gotten a bounce. A Rasmussen Reports poll released last week found 58 percent of all voters in the state approved of the job she was doing, a spike from 41 percent in March.

Not surprisingly, the administration's move drew near-uniform support from advocates pushing for comprehensive reform that includes a pathway to citizenship for 11 million illegal immigrants — including labor heavyweights such as the AFL-CIO.

Yet one notable pro-reform group denouncing the move was ImmigrationWorks USA, a national federation of small business owners, whose leader feared the larger goal of a comprehensive reform bill next year is now in jeopardy.

It energizes the conservative Republican base in time for the crucial midterm elections and angers Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.), whom the president should want on his side, said the group's president, Tamar Jacoby.

“This is tantamount to dropping a nuclear bomb on the senator they need most to pass comprehensive immigration reform,” Jacoby said. “If Jon Kyl is on the warpath against you, just forget it. Don’t bother. Today, the administration is making a choice that I am very concerned about.”

The issue for Republicans, one Democratic strategist said — and a potential saving grace for the House Democratic majority — will be how the GOP handles messaging.

There is a split among Republicans about how to approach immigration reform, with conservatives and tea party activists backing the Arizona measure and moderate GOP-ers using language similar to that Obama has used.

"If they don't package it right, then I think it could be a tie, with the tie going to the Democrats," the strategist said.

The illegal immigration issue already reared its head in the California gubernatorial primary last month, with state Insurance Commissioner Steve Poizner dragging former eBay CEO Meg Whitman to the right in ads over the issue, in which she vowed to be "tough as nails."

She won the primary, but is now plowing her personal fortune into Spanish-language paid media aimed at moving back toward the center and undoing damage caused with the state's Hispanic voters, who still recall the Prop. 187 fight with fury.

Chris Lehane, a California-based Democratic strategist, said the suit might help Democrats in the long run and also invoked the Pete Wilson comparison, saying the legacy of that maneuver was "good short-term politics for the Republicans and bad short-term for the Democrats, but it created an entire consituency that became Democratic."

Another point in the administration's favor? New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's recently announced coalition on immigration reform, which involved business leader and Fox News owner Rupert Murdoch. The mogul's involvement might serve to neutralize the heated discussion of immigration on the influential conservative cable network leading into the fall.

The problem with the politics of illegal immigration, said Dan Schnur, chairman of the California Fair Political Practices Commission and director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, is that it's really "two issues in one."

"It's an issue of border security, but it's also an issue of civil rights," he said."In a general election,