OK, Mitt Romney has a Problem. He couldn’t score a knockout on Super Tuesday. And, given the proportional allocation of delegates and the fact that they’re only bound on the first ballot, he might even face an accident at the GOP convention in Tampa.

Fortunately for Romney, there is a Solution: he can pull a Reagan-Schweiker—announce, before the convention, that he intends to pick Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, the acknowledged national expert on state and local enforcement of immigration law, as his running mate.

By choosing Kobach, Romney commits to campaign on the issue of patriotic immigration reform—something I’d almost given up on, but hey, Romney did come though on self-deportation and defending Arizona’s legislation against Obama.

Consider this:

• Kobach has already endorsed Romney. Hopefully, he knows something we don’t.
• Kobach has already won state-wide office in Kansas. OK, he’s not a governor, as Sarah Palin was. But Kansas has four times the population of Alaska.
• Kobach has won state-wide office in Kansas (2). In other words, he strengthens Romney in Middle America. Too bad Romney didn’t choose him before Saturday’s Kansas primary.
• Kobach has real national experience—he has defended state and local enforcement legislation, as counsel to the Immigration Reform Law Institute and in the media, across the country.
• Kobach, as our writer Anonymous Attorney recently put it, is “almost comically gifted…Harvard, Yale, and Oxford? I mean, really? All three? And he has to look like Harry Hamlin on top of all that?” This means Kobach is not vulnerable to elite educational snobbery, as Palin was. Needless to say, the Left will think of something else—Enoch Powell, the great but much-vilified British immigration patriot, was equally comically gifted i.e. academically credentialed. But they’ll have to try harder.
• Kobach is an extremely impressive debater. I say this, having watched him carefully, although his style is not mine. Kobach is irritatingly, disgustingly, reasonable. But he’s a real force. I am even told that he seems genuinely to have internalized politically correct Not Wanting To Give Offense. I think this is B-O-R-I-N-G. But that should reassure Romney. And who knows, it may work. Kobach is ready for prime time

Yeah, yeah, I know it’s a wild idea. But no-one has ever accused Romney of having imagination. Someone has to have it for him.

Ronald Reagan did have imagination. Heading into the 1976 GOP convention, deadlocked with President Gerald Ford, he selected Pennsylvania’s Senator Richard Schweiker, then perceived as a liberal Republican, to allay the MSM/ Democratic smear that he was some sort of neo-Nazi. (Which may seem strange to the generation has grown up remembering Reagan as only a genial old grandpa, but that really was how he was portrayed—just like immigration patriots today. Hmmm).

It didn’t work, but Reagan came very close. And in 2008 the same tactic was seriously discussed by supporters of both Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton when the race for the Democratic presidential nomination seemed similarly deadlocked.

Veeps can be afterthoughts, but they can also be, well, game changing. It’s forgotten now but John McCain’s wild gamble in picking Sarah Palin appeared for a while to be a triumphant success. Real Clear Politics, for example, showed McCain decisively leading Obama in opinion polls and the Electoral College through much of September—until the blight of Bush, the McCain campaign's own utter uselessness, and the worst financial crisis in eighty years, prevailed.

Contrary to what appears to be the current mood in Washington, it should be relatively easy for the GOP (in its de facto role as GAP, Generic American Party) to win this election.

The reason for this, as VDARE.com has said repeatedly but most conventional analysts apparently cannot bring themselves to consider: demography is destiny in American politics. As a practical matter, ethnic voting patterns do not change very much.

So Electing a New People through the mass legal and illegal immigration of racial minorities will, in the long run, drive American politics inexorably to the left.

In theory, GOP/ GAP could counter this by increasing the turnout and its share of its traditional white base, partly by popular measures which would themselves also directly affect the pace of ethnic shift—such as an immigration moratorium, abolishing birthright citizenship etc. At VDARE.com, we call this “the Sailer Strategy.” But until now, GOP/ GAP has been too cowardly, corrupt and confused by endless mau-mauing from innumerable Treason Lobby MSM bullhorns to take this elementary step.

But, paradoxically, it’s happening anyway (no thanks to the GOP/ GAP leadership). Confronted with what is in effect a Minority Occupation Government, in the alien shape of the Obama Administration and its constant jarring cultural miscues, the white vote is tipping to the GOP. This became undeniable in the 2010 mid-term elections, when the GOP/ GAP got 60% of the white vote. [Exit Polls: Unprecedented White Flight from Democrats, By David Paul Kuhn, RealClearPolitics, November 3, 2010].

And, despite the endless MSM Hispanic Hype, the fact is that whites will cast an estimated 72% of the votes in the 2012 general election. Hispanics? A piddling 8% or so.

The Left is acutely aware of this danger, even if the GOP/ GAP can’t allow itself to think about it. The Left knows that American politics are now profoundly unstable. At all costs, it must keep whites a.k.a. the historic American nation from uniting before they are finally drowned by non-traditional immigration. This explains the intensified attack on MSM figures who might be regarded, as social psychologist Kevin MacDonald has put it, as implicit white champions—Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck, Pat Buchanan, Rush Limbaugh—and the stepped-up efforts to divide Americans on gender and class lines.

(And, yes, I do think it’s a conspiracy. Heard of Journolist?)

Mitt Romney is actually quite well placed to benefit from implicit whiteness. Thus he inspired what can only be called a hymn of hate, illustrated with a Romney family picture, from New York Times blogger Lee Siegel [What’s Race Got To Do With It, January 14, 2012]:

The simple, impolitely stated fact is that Mitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory….I’m referring to the countless subtle and not-so-subtle ways he telegraphs to a certain type of voter that he is the cultural alternative to America’s first black president…”

 

Apart from the fact that I think Americans might quite legitimately want an alternative to Obama, I think this is quite true—although I’m equally sure that Romney is utterly clueless about it.

But it’s also true that Romney is vulnerable to class warfare.

As The Nation’s Ben Adler gloated this week:

“…the takeaway from Super Tuesday is the same: working class voters don’t like Romney, and it’s his greatest liability….Romney lost to Santorum in Ohio among voters making less than $100,000 per year and those without college degrees, just as he did in Michigan.

In November, the candidate who wins the Midwest will win the election. To carry the Midwest, the Republican nominee will need to dominate among white, working class voters…Romney may turn off blue-collar swing voters. Maybe they will vote for Obama, or maybe they will just stay home.

Recent polls suggest Romney may not be strong enough among those voters to overcome Obama. As Ron Brownstein wrote in National Journal on Monday, polls show the primary has been taking a toll on Romney’s image among swing voters:

In the NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, Obama held a 50 percent to 43 percent advantage over Romney nationally, up from a 47 percent to 44 percent lead in the average of the news organizations’ polls during the second half of 2011, just before the voting began in the Republican race. What’s especially striking about the new survey is that it shows Obama has made his biggest gains among the group that has consistently resisted him the most: white voters without a college education

In the NBC/WSJ surveys through the second half of 2011, Romney led Obama among those working-class white voters by a commanding 52 percent to 38 percent…. But in [the] latest survey, Romney’s advantage with those voters had shriveled to just five points—48 percent to 43 percent. By comparison, in 2008 non-college white voters backed John McCain over Obama by a resounding 58 percent to 40 percent; Republicans won even more of them (63 percent) in the 2010 Congressional election.

Romney’s Worsening Working-Class Voter Problem, March 6, 2012.

Needless to say, the simplest single way Mitt Romney can benefit the American working class: embrace patriotic immigration reform. It would reduce worker displacement, stop wage stagnation by tightening up the labor market, stabilize their neighborhoods even in “blue” states, and protect them from immigrant crime.

And, above all, it would appeal to their patriotism. Why not defend America from invasion?

And this is where Kris Kobach comes in.

Do I expect Romney to take my advice? No. Candidate Obama declined to accept my suggestion of Virginia Senator Jim Webb and won anyway, although he could hardly have foreseen that the McCain campaign would be so cowardly.

The conventional thing for Romney to do would be to pick one of his rivals—maybe even Michele Bachmann, who dramatically passed up the chance to hurt him on immigration in the October 11 New Hampshire debate and would certainly balance the ticket. And Romney does seem to be a deeply conventional man.

I know Kris Kobach slightly—the patriotic immigration reform world is small. I last saw him a few weeks ago, walking by at CPAC, deep in conversation. I thought of saying hello, but refrained.  Just as well: as it turned out, Kobach’s conversations were being closely watched by cultural Marxist secret policethings. I’m glad Kobach doesn’t have to explain me to Romney’s vetters.

Here's a link to VDARE.com coverage of Kobach.

Peter Brimelow (email him) is editor of VDARE.COM and author of the much-denounced Alien Nation: Common Sense About America's Immigration Disaster, (Random House - 1995) and The Worm in the Apple (HarperCollins - 2003)