John McCain was interviewed on This Week With George Stephanopoulos and continued to be dishonest in his portrayal of both his record and the record of Barack Obama. One lie which I found particularly irritating was this: “Senator Obama has not been involved in reforms. In fact, he walked away from the immigration reform issue.”
Obama has been involved in passing reform legislation both in the Illinois legislature and in the Senate. The votes which contributed to Obama’s liberal rating from The National Journal, which McCain cited in the debate, included support for reform legislation.
It is bad enough to deny this important part of Obama’s record, but I was particularly annoyed by the claim Obama walked away from immigration reform. As I’ve noted in the past, parts of Michigan and other tourist areas have had problems this year since visas for seasonal workers could not be renewed because John McCain was afraid to have immigration come up during an election year. McCain didn’t walk away–he ran away from the issue.
I do some work with a group called America’s Voice that advocates for comprehensive immigration reform and I definitely hope that McCain and Obama can rise above politics when one of them is president and work with the Congress to get some smart, sensible, productive legislation passed. I thought that McCain once embraced this issue, but I think that he needs to prove that he’s still serious about it and not just bowing to anti-immigration vigilantes.