Candidates Caught in Middle as Words Ring Hollow to Activists
“The next president and the next Congress need to make decisions about a legal immigration system that’s based, first and foremost, on protecting American workers and American wages,” Gov. Scott Walker of Wisconsin said in April.
.. Should the two parties nominate Mr. Bush and Mrs. Clinton, heirs in the country’s leading political families, it is not difficult to imagine a conservative candidate’s mounting a populist third-party run, much as Mr. Buchanan once did, that taps into anti-trade and anti-immigration fervor on the right.
The enhanced expectations and louder shouting from both ends of the political spectrum are a natural outgrowth of President Obama’s administration, said Michael Kazin, a Georgetown University historian. Ambitious presidents who usher in or oversee periods of sweeping change, he said, often lead to the creation of pressure groups on their own side and a fiercer backlash from the opposition.