Analysis: Spitzer loses on license fight

Charging into the frenzied national debate over immigration, New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer had insisted that giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants would make life safer for all.

He found precious little safety in immigration politics. He was whipsawed by both sides, and his initiative became rhetorical ammunition for the presidential campaign.

Under siege, Spitzer sought to salvage his plan by trying to please everyone. He pleased no one and on Wednesday the rookie governor with a hard-charging style conceded the brutally obvious: He had lost, badly.

"Leadership is not solely about doing what one thinks is right. Leadership is also about listening to the public," Spitzer said after meeting with many of his political allies in Congress who had urged retreat.

The debate over immigration, Spitzer said, "has become so toxic that anytime a practical proposal is put forward, it is shot down before it can even be weighed on its merits. The consequence of this fear-mongering is paralysis."

Others say Spitzer did it to himself by stubbornly pushing so hard on a no-win issue.

"He volunteered for this, it was a self-inflicted wound," said Maurice Carroll, director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

The damage wasn't limited to Spitzer, though. Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton has been harshly criticized by campaign rivals who say she has been too noncommittal on this subject.

The issue produced one of the most tense moments of the primary campaign so far, as Clinton stumbled in a debate, saying the Spitzer proposal "makes a lot of sense," yet "I did not say that it should be done."

After Spitzer conceded defeat, Clinton announced she opposed giving licenses to undocumented aliens.

"I support Governor Spitzer's decision today to withdraw his proposal," Clinton said in a statement. "As president, I will not support driver's licenses for undocumented people and will press for comprehensive immigration reform that deals with all of the issues around illegal immigration including border security and fixing our broken system."

Lost in the posturing is the fact that eight other states — Hawaii, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah and Washington — currently do not require drivers to prove legal status in order to obtain a license.

But in Spitzer's case, many Democrats privately grumbled that they were given no advance notice of the plan before it was announced in late September, allowing little chance to build support or answer tough questions from opponents who claimed it would be a boon to both terrorists and gun-loving criminals.

Even in defeat, Spitzer insisted his plan would be a sensible solution to the roughly 1 million undocumented aliens in New York State. Yet as the opposition mounted in late October, the governor struck a deal with the Department of Homeland Security.

The new approach would have created three kinds of licenses: one as secure as a passport for crossing the Canadian border, another that would have met federal standards created to make it more difficult for would-be terrorists to get identification, and a third for purposes of driving, available to illegal immigrants and others.

It was, in a sense, everything to everyone. Security advocates got their fancy new microchip licenses, immigrant advocates got at least some of what they had originally expected.

Both sides, however, disagree so vehemently about who should and should not have government identification in the United States, that the deal only further isolated Spitzer, leaving him in a political no man's land.

The pressure increased in recent days with new poll numbers showing 70 percent of New Yorkers opposed the plan, and more and more Democrats publicly broke ranks.

Standing outside Congress — where so many immigration bills have failed — Spitzer on Wednesday announced his abandonment of the license policy.

In defeat, his supporters talked about leadership and political courage. But many of those same lawmakers have tried and failed to get federal immigration reform.

"This is an issue that's vexed Washington for a while. Now it's spread its plague to Albany and I think the governor learned the lesson that immigration has become the new third rail of politics," said Rep. Anthony Weiner, a New York City Democrat.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said in a phone interview Wednesday that such issues will ultimately have to be solved with federal, not state policies, noting:

"I still have hope in the end Congress is going to see that you can't just leave this unattended."

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EDITOR'S NOTE — Devlin Barrett covers New York's political and congressional issues from Washington.