BOTH PARTIES HAVE FAILED TO DEAL WITH IMMIGRATION, WHICH IS A HUGE PROBLEM FOR DEMOCRATS

That's the shorter version of the first half of this David Broder column.

Emphasis mine in the excerpt below:

As the Democratic presidential race finally gets down to brass tacks, two issues are becoming paramount. But only one of them is clearly on the table.

That is the issue of illegal immigration. A very smart Democrat, a veteran of the Clinton administration, told me that he expects it to be a key part of any Republican campaign and that he is worried about his party's ability to respond.

I think he has good reason to worry. The failure of the Democratic Congress, like its Republican predecessor, to enact comprehensive immigration reform, including improved border security, has left individual states and local communities to struggle with the problem....

Broder also refers to New York State (home of the now-notorious Eliot Spitzer driver's license plan) as "home state of both Hillary Clinton and Rudolph Giuliani," and, of course, Mitt Romney is accusing Rudy Giuliani of having run New York as a "sanctuary city" (a phrase that makes right-wingers' blood boil) -- but, according to Broder, this issue is a problem only for Democrats, even if Rudy's the GOP nominee. (I infer that that's true, according to Broder, even if there's a third-party run by Ron Paul, who doesn't even believe in birthright citizenship.)

Of course, Broder's right -- on this issue, only criticism of the Democrat will be a big story in the general election campaign, because that's the way the game works. It won't matter that Rudy's New York welcomed a lot of illegal immigrants, and that his newly hardened position on this issue is a shameless flipflop. He'll get a free pass.

And I say "criticism of the Democrat" because a Barack Obama spokesman says Obama still supports the Spitzer license plan. That's it -- if Obama does manage to beat Clinton for the nomination, this will be the only issue anyone talks about in the general election campaign. Not Iraq. Not heath care. Not subprime mortgages or Social Security or the environment. Support for this approach will be Obama's Swift Boat. The "centrist" mainstream press will stand by and let the crazies take over the campaign, as usual.

(By the way, you should remember that this issue is a three-parter for the far right: scary immigrants, terrorism, and voter fraud. They'll play all three scare cards in the campaign.)

*****

The idiocy of the latter part of the Broder column is summed up in these three sentences:

No one who has read or studied the large literature of memoirs and biographies of the Clintons and their circle can doubt the intimacy and the mutual dependence of their political and personal partnership.

No one can reasonably expect that partnership to end should Hillary Clinton be elected president. But the country must decide whether it is comfortable with such a sharing of the power and authority of the highest office in the land.

The only possible response to which is: Duh.

I know it's unreasonable to expect Dean Broder to descend from his ivory tower and walk among the common people, but we peasants already know this. We know we're getting both of them if we vote for her. It's really not a difficult concept to grasp, and it's really not something we needed to have explained to us by our betters.