Failure To Communicate and Legislate. Trading Places.
Posted on June 22, 2018
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Here at the Feehery Theory, we have theories about a lot of things, but mostly politics.
We are joined by Tucker Eskew, political strategist, communications specialist, former spokesman to George W. Bush, former press secretary to Governor Carrol Campbell of South Caroline, founder of ViaNova, a top strategic communications firm based in Alexandria, Virgina and an all-around great guy.
Theory One: What we have here is a failure to communicate:
President Trump backed off on the official policy to separate children from their illegal immigrant parents after every living First Lady, including his wife, and Pope Francis, criticized the policy.
Some have called this Trump’s Katrina moment, although his poll ratings have actually climbed to their highest point.
Theory Two: What we have here is a failure to legislate.
The Congress is expected to fail to pass anything to fix our broken immigration system despite widespread agreement that something must be done legislatively.
Tucker and Adam, both of you worked for President Bush and I worked for Speaker Hastert in 2005 when Republicans failed back then to fix the problems.
My view is that the Democrats don’t want to fix the border and would rather have an issue than a solution. But there is plenty of blame to go around with conservatives too.
Is this problem unfixable?
Theory Three: Trading Places
It used to be the Republican Party was the party of free trade and free immigration and that the Democrats were the protectionists. It used to be that the Democrats were the party of the working class and the Republicans were the party of the investor class.
But a funny thing happened on the way to 2016 elections.
Tucker Eskew, I think the Republican Party really started changing when John McCain put Sarah Palin on the ticket and she proved to be much more popular with Republican base than the candidate himself.
What’s your view of the relative state of the two political parties?