Writing in Hugh Hewitt’s page, Dean Barnett covers the bases. He says this of the Administration:

I’ve admired this president for a long time, but I’ve reached a point where I’ve had it up to here (my hand is at my forehead) with this administration’s chronic obtuseness and arrogance. The top priority right now for the administration should be the war. And yet the president spent what little political capital he had trying to shove this atrocious immigration bill down the country’s throat. This whole gambit was the logical equivalent of Abraham Lincoln in February of 1864 seeking out the non-war related issue that would most effectively divide his base and then relentlessly championing that issue. That would have been dumb, right? And yet that’s exactly what President Bush did.

 

President Bush is going to need a united base come September if he wants to stay the course in Iraq. Given that consideration, calling 90% of that base bigots probably wasn’t a very good idea. Fickle, weak-kneed and misguided Republican senators like Dick Lugar are already preemptively declaring defeat.

 

Will the Republican base forgive the administration for its actions surrounding this bill? My guess is no. We’re moving on to finding another leader for the party, and in 7 months or so we’ll have one. In the meantime, thanks to this idiotic gambit, there’s a power vacuum right now in the White House.

 

Maybe the base can fill that vacuum. The only good news is that the past political fortnight showed that the Republican base, when enthusiastic, can have a dramatically positive effect on Republican politicians. If the base demands victory in Iraq as loudly as it demanded defeat for this immigration bill, the Republicans in congress will once again listen.

And then he supports what I said yesterday that it was a victory for conservative base voters:

Yes, it sounds trite, but your voice was heard. Remember, the original aim of this bill’s authors was to have it enshrined as law in a mere 48 hours. You raised such a fuss that that became impossible. But the bill’s supporters were undeterred and remained the clear majority in the Senate.

 

Truly, I don’t think a single Senator changed his mind on the underlying merits of the bill. Those that changed their votes did so because they heard from their constituents. So what’s the takeaway? Your voice counts.  In a democracy, that’s a very fine thing.

He’s not so kind to John McCain, Lindsey Graham and Trent Lott. But he points out that there wwere some heroes among republicans just the same.

Lest we find ourselves lost in a throw-the-bums-out mentality, let’s take a moment to recognize the Republican Senators and Congressmen who led the fight to beat back this wildebeest of a bill. I had Pete Hoekstra on the show last night; Rep. Hoekstra isn’t known as a ball of fire, but he was passionate last night. He was great. He fought against the tide and he wasn’t alone.

 

Jim DeMint has been a stalwart on this since day one. Same goes for Sessions, Cornyn and Inhofe. David Vitter went mano-a-mano with Harry Reid. John Shadegg showed what real House leadership would look like. Someday we’ll have a Speaker Shadegg, and that will be a fine thing indeed. If I left any of the politician good guys out of this brief list (and I’m sure I did), my apologies.

Writing in this morning’s Washington Times, Stephen Dinan points out something similar:

The immigration-reform bill was supposed to be a defining moment for the old guard.

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy could establish a new civil rights legacy to rival his brothers’; Sen. John McCain could show leadership and accomplishment by standing up to his party’s base; and President Bush could secure a major domestic achievement for his second term.

Instead, the young guns — a small, wily group of junior Republican senators, most of them with less than a full term in the upper chamber — sent the bill into a tailspin, tying Democratic leaders into legislative knots and earning enough opposition among senators to block the Senate bill, culminating in yesterday’s vote to kill the measure.

It may well be that many of the same voters whom gave support to the senators who were behind the bill’s defeat are supporter’s of the Iraq War. They likely don’t personalize the issue as the MSM would have you believe and will support the President on the war.  They just disagreed with him on this bill.