Following last night’s surprising election results in Florida, several Latino Republicans are arguing that gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum (R-FL) lost his bid for governor largely as a result of his recent introduction of a tough, Arizona-style immigration bill. The Miami Herald reports:

GOP lobbyist and fundraiser Ana Navarro, who dropped her support for McCollum after he proposed a law “tougher” than the controversial immigration bill in Arizona, said McCollum’s stance lowered his margin of victory in Miami-Dade — and kept many Hispanic voters from going to the polls.

“I think he can blame [immigration],” Navarro said. “I think if you speak frankly with McCollum himself, he would admit it was a mistake.”

It was McCollum’s sudden support of an Arizona-style immigration bill — after originally distancing himself from that kind of legislation — that hurt him, said Carlos Curbelo, Republican in a runoff for a Miami-Dade School Board seat.

“That change took away much of McCollum’s credibility,” he said, while adding that Scott, who has attacked McCollum’s immigration proposal, faces a difficult task ahead in trying to woo Florida Hispanics.

It’s hard to say whether enough Republican Latinos stayed home yesterday to make up for the 40,000 votes that McCollum’s opponent, Rick Scott (R-FL) was able to capture over him. However, it is pretty clear his immigration bill didn’t help him nearly as much as he had hoped — if at all. A Mason-Dixon survey conducted on August 9th and 11th put McCollum at a slight 34 to 30 percent lead over Scott. On August 11th McCollum unveiled the “Florida Immigration Enforcement Act” and began campaigning on it. However, a couple weeks later, not much had changed in the polls. Quinnipiac University released a survey this Monday showing McCollum’s lead at 39 to 35 percent against Scott.

Perhaps more significantly, most Florida voters cite the economy as a top concern, not immigration enforcement. At the very least, McCollum’s bill was a distraction that cost him time, effort, and money that could’ve been directed towards convincing voters that he could address Florida’s economic woes. While 86 percent of Florida Republicans support bringing the Arizona law to their state, that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing on their mind when they enter the voting booth.

Finally, it is certainly possible that a drop in Latino Republican support may have contributed to his loss as some Latino Republicans are suggesting. A majority of the 1,600 Latino voters surveyed in four states, including Florida, said they would be likely to vote against a candidate if they disagreed with the candidate’s stance on immigration — and the majority of Latinos nationwide oppose Arizona’s approach to immigration. In Florida, 54 percent of Latino GOP voters support the Arizona law, but 36 percent oppose it — enough to make a difference in a tight race.

Ultimately, Latino sentiments will likely have a much bigger impact in Florida’s general election this fall. The same survey also found that a majority of Latinos in those states identify as Democrats, echoing reports over the past couple years that Florida’s Republican Latino electorate is shrinking. Meanwhile, Scott and McCollum shared pretty similar immigration platforms — something which will likely haunt Scott in November, but didn’t present angry Latino GOP voters with a chance yesterday to flex their political muscles (other than staying home). As far as the primary goes, as of August 14th, McCollum still had 57 percent support from Latino Republicans, compared with 21 percent for Scott. And while several notable Latino Republicans such as Reps. Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) sharply criticized McCollum’s move on immigration, other than Navarro, few went as far as to send a strong message to the Latino community by pulling their endorsement.

Today’s news from Iraq that “bombers and gunmen launched an apparently coordinated string of attacks against Iraqi government forces on Wednesday,” killing at least 50 people across 13 towns, provides an opportunity to reflect on one of the most dubious and, frankly, profane justifications for the Iraq war: “Taking the fight to the terrorists” — fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.

George W. Bush explained in 2005, while describing Iraq as “the latest battlefield in this war“:

Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania. There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home.

This after-the-fact justification for the war — necessary in the embarrassing absence of either WMD or any substantive Saddam-Al Qaeda relationship — eventually became known as “Flypaper Theory.” The basic idea was that a U.S. presence in Iraq would distract extremists from trying to attack America. Because, presumably, a bus ticket to Baghdad is less expensive that a plane ticket to New York. But while it’s probably true that at least some of the extremists drawn to Iraq would have attacked elsewhere, the evidence is overwhelming that, for the majority of foreign fighters in Iraq (who, in any case, represented a small minority of insurgents), the U.S. occupation of Iraq itself was the decisive factor in their radicalization and mobilization.

While it’s generally believed that Al Qaeda in Iraq no longer has the capacity to seriously threaten to collapse the government, or to elicit the level of reprisals that led to Iraq’s 2006-7 sectarian civil war, they still retain the ability, as the last few weeks have horrifically demonstrated, to launch multiple coordinated deadly attacks, reaching what General Ray Odierno referred to as an “irreducible minimum,” beyond which it’s very difficult to degrade a committed group of terrorists.

Obviously, the continued presence of a group like Al Qaeda is a really tragic state of affairs for Iraqis, who, like most people, don’t tend to enjoy it when they, their friends, or their relatives get maimed in terrorist attacks, or living in constant fear that such a thing could happen. It’s important to remember, though — especially when tempted to wax indignant over views of the effects of American policy that hurt our feelings — that luring terrorists to Iraq to blow themselves up in markets and mosques and police recruiting stations wasn’t some tragic side-effect of the Iraq war, it was in fact a stated goal of the war, one with which Iraqis will tragically have to contend for some time to come. This, as much as anything, is George W. Bush’s legacy in Iraq.

NY1 reports today of a likely hate crime in New York City, which has been the site of an ugly, emotional debate over the proposed Park 51 Islamic community center near the site of Ground Zero. The news station reports that a cab driver was attacked by a young man who appears to have assaulted him due to his Islamic faith. The man reportedly asked the driver if he was Muslim, and when he confirmed that he was, the young man attacked the driver, slashing him “in the throat, arm and lip” with a knife:

A city cab driver is in the hospital after being stabbed by a passenger who allegedly asked if he was Muslim, police tell NY1. Investigators with the New York City Police Department say it all began Monday night when a 21-year-old man hailed a cab at 24th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.

Police say the passenger asked the driver, “Are you Muslim?” When the driver said yes the passenger pulled a knife and slashed him in the throat, arm and lip.

Both the driver and the alleged attacker are currently hospitalized in Bellevue Hospital. The first casualty of the “Ground Zero mosque.”

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