Oh, I don't know. He seemed to lose it at the end, creating a series of major political disasters for President Bush.

Well, other than immigration, I don't agree. The prescription drug benefit was probably going to happen no matter what, it deprived the Dems of a winning issue, and was the price we paid to get HSA's, which I think will be much more important in the long run.

And even the immigration mess is part of reaching out (not the way I'd do it myself) to Hispanics, who are a key Dem voting block and our biggest minority group, and whose values make them potential Republicans.

It won't work. The only Hispanic group that is majority Republican are the Cubans. All Hispanic ethnic groups can't stand each other, but they all band together in despising the Cubans, that means the rest of them will always be susceptible to the Democrats' tune.

I don't know my political party history too well, but haven't first-generation immigrants historically been largely Democratic? And after a few generations of assimilation, redistributed like other populations?

I don't know about other immigrant groups. All I know is that for most of my life most Cuban-Americans were Republicans.

The common pattern is for immigrants to be Democrat at first, and gradually become more evenly divided between the parties over a few generations. (With exceptions such as those fleeing "progressive" regimes, such as the Cubans.) For instance, the 80's saw a lot of Catholic ethnics become "Reagan Democrats," as they rebelled against the hippie squalor that overtook the traditionally Catholic and moralistic Dems.

But it's not something you can bet on. For instance, no amount of lefty anti-Semitism seems to drive the Jews away from the Dems. And the trend among Hispanics is not clear yet.