I must say that I’m enjoying the ongoing Romney immigration trainwreck. It’s becoming increasingly clear that either Romney had no plan at all for how to deal with the issue, or he felt he had no real room to maneuver without losing significant support. So while Obama has been making bold, smart, popular moves on the subject, Romney’s been issuing vague suggestions that nobody is paying attention to or cares about, alternating bad faith attacks on Obama with wimpy cant that really just makes him look utterly pathetic.

People don’t respond to this. They respond to strong moves and positions. Honestly, Romney would probably have been better off from a strategic standpoint just outright condemning Obama’s DREAM and continuing to be borderline nativist. I don’t really think the Hispanic vote was going to be up for grabs this year, and certainly not for someone with Romney’s recent history. That he spent so much time working on trying to reboot himself on this issue despite having serious handicaps to overcome and no real room to maneuver shows that he’s basically an imbecile who can’t understand that he can’t have everything that he wants, or won’t listen. And this morning’s capper was even more ridiculous:

Despite his nod to states’ rights, Romney did not say whether he agreed with any or all of the Supreme Court’s decision, a complicated ruling that labeled several provisions of the law unconstitutional, but left the most controversial segment for later, saying future courts would need time to determine its effects. Nor has Romney taken a position on whether he supports SB 1070 in the first place, despite embracing the architect of the law, Kris Kobach, as an immigration adviser during the presidential primaries. An e-mail to the Romney campaign asking for further clarification on the Supreme Court ruling was not immediately returned and an official told the traveling press not to expect any more comments. [...]

Romney’s does-he-or-doesn’t-he SB 1070 statement comes on the heels of his prolonged dodge of President Obama’s recent executive order blocking deportation of some young illegal immigrants, refusing to say expressly whether he would overturn the action. A young undocumented college student confronted Romney Thursday after his speech to Latino group NALEO in Florida, and said she didn’t have any better luck getting Romney to articulate a position as to what would happen to her under his administration. Though Romney vowed to “replace and supersede” Obama’s order with a long-term solution, he has offered only scraps of information on what that solution might entail, saying only that he favors some path to legal status for members of the military.

In other words, what’s my position, you ask? OBAMA SUCKS, that’s my position!

It seems pretty obvious that Romney only knows how to use the issue as a way of appealing to the xenophobes, since it was used against him in this way to deny him the nomination in 2008 (remember his hiring illegal immigrants?), and he used it to administer the coup de grace to Rick Perry’s hapless campaign. But he could have done this many different ways. A “no comment” would have been possible. Something along the lines of, “we’ll have to look at the details of the ruling and their implications more and get back to you” would have almost been respectable. But ultimately, Romney has no feel for the electorate to such an extent that he makes the occasionally tenuous grasp on it displayed by Obama look positively Rooseveltian by comparison, and the effect of constant, unchanging Obama attacks will have some form of wearying effect on the electorate. We have seen this precisely in the two prior elections he’s lost.