George Bush seized a rare opportunity to be at his best, by discussing the immigration issue, a topic he knows well and for which he would actually deserve the "compassionate conservative" label under which he ran in 2000.
The ideas may have been recycled, the means to implement them somewhat dubious, but at least it was an honest attempt at opening a reasonable and comprehensive debate, beyond the collective fixation on the border issue.
The irony is that this president, caught at his own game of invoking national security to justify any controversial policy, is now using this issue as a temporary foil for his many disasters in the "war on terror".
Ostensibly demanding that the Senate vote on a project under a two week deadline, he has pushed several embarrassing topics out of the national conversation: the NSA domestic spying operations, the vice-president's involvement in the exposure of CIA agent Valerie Plame, the republican lobbying scandals. And if anyone is going to mention Iraq, it is to speculate that the deployment of American reservists will most likely diminish, since the president wants to mobilize the National Gard to support the Border Patrol.
The whole plan might be obsolete before the next elections - as soon as someone remembers , for instance, that the current backlog means that legal immigrants wait for months for their documents after being approved for a green card, so far the only tamper-proof ID for legal aliens. But by then there will be a lot of blame to spread for the failure of the reform. Karl Rove, who even allowed himself the luxury to acknowledge that the war is dragging his boss' numbers down, is alive and well.