Tough Election Has McCain Changing Colors

If truth is the first casualty of war, then consistency must be one of the first things to perish in the immigration debate.

Just look at poor John McCain. Locked in a tight U.S. Senate re-election battle in Arizona, McCain has spent the last several weeks parroting the simplistic rhetoric of the same extreme immigration restrictionists he spent years mocking. He even has a television ad that shows him walking along the Arizona-Mexico border with a county sheriff concerned about violence on the frontier. The solution is simple, says McCain, let's just "complete the dang fence."

Oh really, senator? This is a different message than the one he shared with the readers of Vanity Fair in 2007 when he characterized a border fence as the "least effective" of an array of enforcement measures. Nonetheless, he was so eager then to serve the people of Arizona that, he said, he would "build the (expletive deleted) fence if they want it." So which is it, the dang fence or (expletive deleted) fence?

Being in a border city, this editorial page has never been enamored of the idea that the immigration problem can be fixed by building a wall or putting up a fence, and calling it a day. In fact, as has been pointed out by longtime border researcher Wayne Cornelius, formerly of UC San Diego, building walls often has the effect of sealing off immigrant communities and preventing the kind of cross-border migration that allows immigrants to go home.

Nowadays, it's not just more barbed wire that McCain wants to see on the border.

He also wants the National Guard deployed there. He drove that point home this week during a Senate hearing where he locked horns with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the former governor of the Grand Canyon State. McCain and Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona are demanding that the administration send 3,000 National Guard troops to the Arizona-Mexico border. McCain tried to nail down Napolitano as to whether the troops were on their way.

Apparently not. Napolitano sidestepped the question, talking instead about how her department was beefing up its border enforcement efforts.

That didn't please McCain, who kept asking for National Guard troops to be deployed to Arizona. It all had the feel of a public relations stunt. After all, in 2006, when President George W. Bush deployed the National Guard to the border in "Operation Jumpstart," that's what McCain called the idea — "partially PR." Apparently, he has warmed to the concept since then.

We, too, support the idea of deploying the National Guard, but only when really needed and only in a support role in which troops help repair fencing, fix vehicles, monitor surveillance equipment and otherwise free up Border Patrol agents to do their jobs more effectively. There's nothing wrong with that.

Is this what McCain has in mind. Who knows? Sadly, his thinking seems to change with the weather, political and otherwise.

REPRINTED FROM THE SAN DIEGO UNION-TRIBUNE.

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