Amnesty is 2014’s ObamaCare

Many are predicting a bad year for Democrats in 2014, and Democratic apologists are pointing to an unfavorable map as the reason.

It is true that Democrats had to defend a number of incumbents who represented states that voted for GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, but this argument really holds little water, as many of those same incumbents won in 2008 when their states voted against President Obama’s election.

New Hampshire’s Senate race proves that this election is about something much more significant than the vagaries of the election map. Instead it is about issues, and one issue in particular — amnesty for illegal aliens.

{mosads}New Hampshire Republican Senate nominee Scott Brown may be the luckiest politician of the past 50 years. Just five short years ago, Brown was an unknown, little thought of, special election Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts. Plugging along across what is a barren wasteland for Republicans, Brown caught the first wave of the anti-ObamaCare Tea Party tsunami, which flooded across the Bay State, taking him to victory.

Now, after losing reelection in 2012 and moving north to New Hampshire, Brown faces incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, in a contest that a year ago national Democrats thought would be a gimme.

But something happened on the way to November. Brown discovered 2014’s ObamaCare equivalent — illegal alien amnesty. Once Brown started hammering Shaheen on amnesty, the election turned from a 10 point blowout to a toss up.

Brown learned that the amnesty issue is about fairness. It is about fairness to those who are here in America legally. It is about fairness to the citizens and legal workers who want a job but can’t find one in the stagnant economy. It’s about the basic concept of fairness that we learned in grade school when someone tried to take cuts in the lunch line.

Brown also learned that the overall border issue is about security. As the world careens seemingly out of control with 13th-century evil severing heads across the Middle East and even in Oklahoma, the nation has been rocked by a realization that the crazies are living amongst us.

America has traditionally been insulated by the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, with friendly neighbors on the north and south. This is why the attacks on 9/11 were such a shock, and why the images of thousands of illegal aliens crossing our southern border in a wave this summer were stunning. The Obama administration’s choice to not only fail to defend our southern border, but to reward those who breached it, galvanized many to whom illegal immigration was an afterthought at best.

Now, the last poll in the New Hampshire race shows a dead heat. On Tuesday, voters in the state will decide whether to keep their well-known, comfortable incumbent and the president’s policies that she supports, or if their sense of increased national and personal insecurity symbolized by the amnesty issue overwhelms her.

If Brown is chosen by the people of New Hampshire to be their next senator, he will have ridden two different populist waves to victory within five years in two separate states. A Scott Brown victory would be a truly remarkable story of one man catching lightning in a bottle twice.

Manning (@rmanning957) is vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government. Contact him at rmanning@getliberty.org.