Former DNC Chairman Howard Dean called President Obama’s immigration enforcement shift Friday a “brilliant move” and “the end of the road for Governor Romney on the Latino front.”
“Governor Romney is on record as saying he would veto the DREAM Act. President Obama just put in what he could of the DREAM Act by executive order, since the Congress refused to pass it,” Dean said this morning on CBS’ “Face the Nation.”
“And now Romney is left holding the bag. If he says anything in favor of what the president wants to do, he alienates the right wing, which has been his problem all along. And if he denies what the president has said and says it’s a terrible idea, he digs him an deeper hole with Latinos,” he said.
Dean predicted that Romney could only salvage the Hispanic vote by putting a Latino on the ticket.
“Most people believe that if you can’t get 40 percent of the Latino vote and you’re a Republican, you can’t win,” he said. “Here’s he’s not going to get anywhere close to 40 percent.”
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), on the show with Dean, called Obama’s move “breathtakingly getting around the law” instead of fixing a broken immigration system.
“I don’t think it’s a brilliant move when the president of the United States tells a federal agency, stop enforcing the law. I can’t ever remember that happening, and that’s what they’re doing,” Graham said, predicting that the Hispanic community would see the order as “too little, too late.”
“He made a promise to the country and to the Hispanic community he would solve immigration completely and comprehensively in his first year,” the senator added about Obama. “He had a huge Democratic majority in both houses. He did nothing.”
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