Obama Plays Election-Year Politics on Immigration

But the same could be said of some Democratic senators. As Immigration Works, a pro-comprehensive immigration bill lobby, put it, "the president is still scolding and blaming Republicans rather than appealing to them in terms that might draw them into a serious effort to compromise on a bill."

The group might have added that as a senator, Obama himself voted for at least one amendment labeled as a "poison pill" by Edward Kennedy and other leaders of the bipartisan effort in 2007. Kennedy knew that you had to disappoint some liberal groups to hold a bipartisan coalition together. Obama, then running for president, didn't go along.

One result of the failure of the 2006 and 2007 bills has been a push for tougher enforcement at the border and workplace, beginning under George W. Bush and continuing now. Conservatives are wrong to scoff at Obama's statement that "we have more boots on the ground on the southwest border than at any time in our history." We do.

He might have added, but didn't, that an Arizona law requiring employers to use the federal E-Verify system has resulted in a statistically significant decline in the illegal immigrant population in that state, according to the Census Bureau. A similar federal measure might make a comprehensive bill more palatable to many Republicans and some Democrats, too.

More important, the administration undermined the "bipartisan framework" proposed by Sens. Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham by its on-again off-again approach and, as on stimulus and health care legislation, has provided little or no guidance in the drafting of inevitably complex legislation.