Yesterday, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) spoke to a “friendly audience” of business leaders about immigration policy, a topic he has been quiet on ever since the right wing erupted in rage over his support for the Senate’s immigration reform bill. After the business leaders complained about the difficulty in obtaining temporary visas for certain immigrants, McCain said reform needs to be a “top agenda item“:

Senator Kennedy and I tried very hard to get immigration reform, a comprehensive plan, through the Congress of the United States. … It is a federal responsibility. … I believe we have to secure our borders, and I think most Americans agree with that, because it’s a matter of national security. But we must enact comprehensive immigration reform. We must make it a top agenda item if we don’t do it before, and we probably won’t, a little straight talk, as of January 2009.

As RawStory noted, the anti-immigration right wing pounced. AllahPundit called it a “sunny little pander,” after McCain repeatedly said he would “secure the borders” first. “John McCain is a liar,” said John Hawkins. McCain is “back to his full, open-borders shamnesty push,” said Michelle Malkin.

McCain’s campaign, however, quickly pandered to the right wing. The National Review’s Jim Geraghty reports that the campaign said McCain’s statement on the priority of immigration reform was “poorly worded“:

Team McCain tells me the senator’s comments were poorly worded. There’s been no discussion within the campaign of altering their stance on illegal immigration, and as far as everyone on the campaign is concerned, the policy is still, ‘secure the border first.’

It’s hard to believe McCain’s comments were “poorly worded.” The New York Times reported that McCain “asked others on the panels for suggestions about how to ‘better mobilize American public opinion‘ behind comprehensive immigration reform.” McCain said immigrants “are also God’s children,” urging “human and compassionate” reform, which drew applause.

McCain’s flip flops on immigration are becoming commonplace. During a Jan. 30 GOP presidential debate, McCain said he “would not” vote for his own immigration bill now. But yesterday, he called the rejection of the Senate immigration bill a personal “failure.” It seems McCain’s immigration policies change from day to day, depending on the audience.

In a sane world, Republican leaders would listen more to Grover Norquist:

Listen more to him on foreign policy that is! Instead, they decide to ignore his advice on that subject, and focus instead on his crazy tax policy advice which they then link up with a crazy foreign policy vision.

Chris Bowers could convince me that Janet Napolitano is unacceptably hawkish on Iraq to be a VP nominee I could support, but I don’t think linking to a fourteen month-old statement that “In my view, we got into this war without thinking through everything we should have, we should not get out of this war without thinking everything through” really fits the bill.

Yes, that’s a lame wanky sentiment that I didn’t agree with fourteen months ago, but it was fourteen months ago. I wouldn’t want a vice president who would oppose withdrawal or who had some kind of record of chest-thumping rhetoric he or she couldn’t walk away from, but that’s not what this is. Chris also deems her insufficiently progressive on immigration, but she was a supporter of the comprehensive reform bill so I don’t really see what the beef is here.

Today, the Senate entered the first day of its Memorial Day recess – but not before holding a brief pro forma session. “Without that procedural move, the Senate would technically be adjourned and President Bush could install administration officials or judges as ‘recess appointments’ — without Senate confirmation.” Sen. Sheldon Brown (D-OH), who presided over the session, said, “We’re not going to let them get away with that kind of abuse of power.”

Taylor Marsh says:

Tumulty, like so many others, are ignoring Clinton’s only goal, which is to make the case to SuperDs that she would be the best nominee against John McCain, the traditional media, as well as the Obama blogs, are missing one of the greatest political dramas ever to unfold, second only to the 2000 election.

Clinton is campaigning on counting every single vote. But also that every Democratic delegate should be focused on who can win in November.

Now, I just disagree with Marsh on the Florida/Michigan issue. But it’s quite true — and indeed quite striking — that the Clinton campaign has now shifted to a pretty single-minded focus on electability. The reason, of course, is that they know Obama will win a majority of delegates and they think the electability argument is most appealing to Democrats. The trouble is that the electability argument they really need is an absolutely electability argument which holds that it’s almost inconceivable that Obama will beat McCain in November. That, however, isn’t at all plausible and I was on a call yesterday where Howard Wolfson was at some pains to clarify that he wasn’t making that argument.

Instead, she’s leaning on the relative electability argument which holds that she’s simply more likely to beat McCain. This is much more plausible as an argument. But unfortunately, it’s also much less persuasive. Nobody ever really wants to say that they’re backing the less electable horse in a nominating contest, but it’s also true that nobody ever really wants to say they’re passing up a superior candidate in favor of a more electable one. Thus, by convenient coincidence, in essentially every hotly contested primary fight, the people who think Candidate A would be better on the merits also deem Candidate A more electable. The reality is just that nobody knows who’s more electable and nobody ever really knows or even knows how we might find out. Consequently, with a clear majority of self-IDed Democrats now backing Obama it’s inconceivable that the superdelegates will do what Clinton wants.

At last a website comes along to ask: Is Barack Obama Muslim? As the site says, the answer is no. I hope if we all link, the Google ranking will go up.

New HRC campaign rationale — Obama might get shot and killed before formally securing the nomination, so she may as well stay in the race!

UPDATE: On a more serious note, the difference between the current race and other previous campaigns that may have lingered on into June is that given this year’s primary schedule there simply aren’t enough delegates left at stake for future primaries to make a difference. If she were holding out for a June primary in California that she thought would let her catch up, that’d be a very different story from the actual “waiting for Puerto Rico” scenario we’re currently in.