More bad publicity is hitting GOP Presidential contender Mitt Romney today — just when he was trying to go on the offensive.
Romney is accusing New York City under Mayor Rudy Giuliani of being a haven for illegal immigration and is blasting his stance on this issue.
But then now ABC News has come up with an absolutely DEVASTATING piece of fact-checking reporting that strongly suggests Romney’s comments are not….consistent…with both his private actions of the years, his record in office or what he has advocated in the past. The piece essentially accuses Romney of being a hypocrite without using the actual word.
All Giuliani and his people need to do is to copy the ABC report and hand it out to all Republican voters and Romney will have a very tough primary season since he will be spending time answering it.
First, here’s the Romney charge:
In one of the strongest conflicts yet between Republican presidential front-runners, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney attacked rival Rudy Giuliani Wednesday, implying that Giuliani supported illegal immigration when he was mayor of New York.
“If you look at lists compiled on Web sites of sanctuary cities, New York is at the top of the list when Mayor Giuliani was mayor,” Romney said at the Abbey Hotel here. “He instructed city workers not to provide information to the federal government that would allow them to enforce the law. New York City was the poster child for sanctuary cities in the country.”
The Giuliani campaign issued a statement rejecting the charge. Campaign communications director Katie Levinson said, “I am not even sure we should weigh in on this, given Mitt Romney may change his mind later today about it. Mitt Romney is as wrong about Mayor Giuliani’s position on illegal immigration as he was when he last mischaracterized the mayor’s record and later had to apologize. New York is the safest large city in America since Mayor Giuliani turned it around — it is not a haven for illegality of any kind. The mayor’s record speaks for itself.”
And now here’s the ABC News report, which is worth looking at in some detail since it clearly accuses Romney of hypocrisy:
For 10 years, Romney used the services of a landscaping company for his Belmont, Mass., estate that hired illegal workers from Guatemala, workers who told the Boston Globe that Romney never inquired about their legal status.
Presidential cabinet appointees have seen their planned move to White House cabinet posts doomed due to that…
And it gets worse.
While Romney was governor, the commonwealth of Massachusetts became one of the six states with the largest growth in unauthorized migrant population, from 2002 to 2004, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, with somewhere between 200,000-250,000 new illegal immigrants. Romney was governor from January 2003 until 2007.
So voters in GOP primaries could rightfully ask him what the state did, what the state clamored for, and why the jump was so high.
But he sought to clamp down on the illegal immigration, right?
Romney in the past voiced support for immigration reform bills far more liberal than the 2007 bill.
In 2005, he called immigration reform efforts by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and President Bush that provided a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants “reasonable proposals” that were “very different than amnesty. … It’s saying you could work your way into becoming a legal resident of the country by working here without taking benefits and then applying and then paying a fine.”
In 2006, Romney said “those that are here paying taxes and not taking government benefits should begin a process toward application for citizenship, as they would from their home country.”
The ABC report notes that his immigration stance is what has hurt him in the Republican polls.
The larger problem for Romney is that he has a long history of flip flops, which he adeptly explains and due to his personal charisma, which comes across well on television, he has been something of a Teflon candidate (unlike Velcro candidate Senator John McCain).
But by going after Giuliani on this issue when his own record is so….at variance…with his current assertions, is likely to boomerang.
It gives Giuliani — and Romney’s other foes — the perfect opening to now take the easy political way out: just rattle off the list of points in the ABC News reports. There is little in the Romney personal or political record to indicate he has a history of being the kind of hard-liner on immigration that so many Republican voters seek. And Democrats can smile as they watch all of this unfold, all because Hispanic voters will likely be out in force in 2008 to give their response to the Republican hard line.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.