Shushannah Walshe writes that Senator John McCain's former Chief of Staff, Grant Woods, says that McCain opposed the DREAM Act out of a sense of "betrayal" from Latino voters:
McCain also voted no Saturday on the Dream Act, which would have granted citizenship to thousands of foreign-born college students. He initially sponsored the legislation. Gullett said McCain constantly faced voters on the campaign trail last year asking about border security and that affected his stance. His communications director, Brooke Buchanan, explained that on immigration, McCain believes the border needs to be secured above all else, citing the increasing border violence over the last four years. "His opinion has evolved with time," she said. "Don't we expect our leaders to base their opinions and policies, don't we expect them to change with the time? And that's what Sen. McCain has been doing. It's truly in the best interest of our country."
Woods said "it hurts" McCain to vote against legislation like the Dream Act after years of working on reform but said the senator felt betrayed when Latinos overwhelmingly supported Obama in 2008. "When you carry that fight at great sacrifice year after year and then you are abandoned during the biggest fight of your life, it has to have some sort of effect on you," he said.
That's an extraordinary statement if true. So McCain, in order to collectively punish Latinos for having the gall to vote for anyone else, decided he'd prevent hundreds of thousands of people who didn't vote in the last election and are here undocumented through no fault of their own from having a path to legal status?
Woods must not think very much of McCain's character, since that explanation simultaneously suggests McCain's prior bravery on immigration issues were mere self-serving electioneering and that he's so incredibly callous that he'd punish a group of people who had nothing to do with his defeat simply because many of them share the same ethnic background as a group of voters that went in large numbers for his opponent. But we're supposed to have sympathy for McCain because it "hurts" him to so? What about all the young people who are stuck without a path to citizenship because McCain felt like taking out his anger on them?
