speech lessons for Democrats

According to TAPPED, Nancy Pelosi held an intimate breakfast this morning with some friendly journalists. Among the other topics mentioned was immigration. Pelosi outlined her strategy regarding this “new” hot-potato that is dividing her party.

Her solution? To get the correct-sounding talking points:

Calling herself a “devout Catholic,” the Speaker said she’s been talking to members of the clergy about modeling from the pulpit respectful ways of speaking about immigrants.

[e.a.]

Ya know, voters aren’t like kindergarteners or religious congregations. They don’t want moral instruction about respect—or moral instruction about anything else—from their political representatives. I thought that’s what the antipathy of us secularists toward the religious right was all about: we don’t want moral instruction from anyone’s God or the self-proclaimed representative of anyone’s God. Correct?

Well, I don’t know anyone who’s yearning for a religious-themed left. So why is Pelosi looking to the Catholic Church for “modeling” a message for Democrats on immigration?

If you’re interested in understanding more about the Democrats’ looming problems with immigration, you can read Fred Siegel in Contentions:

Clinton’s definitive “no” [at last night's debate on driver's licences for illegal immigrants] took her partly off the general election hook. But with nearly 80 percent of voters opposing driver’s licenses for illegal immigrants, her party, as represented by Obama and Bill Richardson, is still in the hot seat on this issue. Led by liberal Democrats, seventeen states have opposed a national standard for driver’s licenses. (In eight of these states, licenses are already being issued to undocumented workers.) This has led Peter Brown of the Quinnipiac Poll to analogize that, like affirmative action for racial minorities—an issue that badly damaged the Democrats in the 1970’s and 1980’s—today’s immigration issue has split the party’s working class supporters from its liberal activists. And as with affirmative action, liberal activists are quick to deride their opponents as racists.

Brown is right about the broad similarities. But there are also significant differences. Affirmative action and racial quotas pitted middle- and lower-middle-class white male Democrats against African-Americans and liberal activists. But on immigration, the remaining white working-class Democrats are aligned with most African-American voters, who are often those most directly in competition with low cost illegal immigrant labor.

No amount of “modeling” respectful ways of speaking about immigration is going to allay the fears of working-class Democrats, or to bring together the two disparate strands of the Democratic party—the elites vs. the hoi polloi. The fight is on. It cannot be papered over.