Peace on the border: why anti-immigration conservatives fell flat in 2006.

AuthorWeigel, David
PositionColumns - Vernon Robinson

FORMER CONGRESSIONAL candidate Vernon Robinson sounds resigned, and more than a little tired, when you ask him to explain his defeat. "The 2006 election was not a referendum on immigration," he says. "I would have liked it to be, but it didn't happen."

That's an understatement. In the tumultuous political year of 2006, Robinson, a former city councilman from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, became one of the country's most notorious voices for a crackdown on illegal immigration. In March, as the Republican-led House of Representatives wrestled with a harsh reform bill that would build a wall on the border and classify crossers as felons, Robinson's campaign launched a TV ad that opened with the theme from The Twilight Zone and Rod Serling--style narration: "If you're a conservative Republican, watching the news these days can make you feel as though you're in the Twilight Zone.... The aliens are here, but they didn't come in a spaceship. They came across our unguarded Mexican border by the millions."

The ad was a sensation. For everyone who saw it in North Carolina's 13th District, where Robinson was challenging Democratic Rep. Brad Miller, dozens more saw it on You Tube and on blogs that trafficked the ad across the Web. "This is tough," Hardball host Chris Matthews swooned, re-running the ad on his MSNBC chat fest. "It's strong, it makes fun of the other side viciously, but I remember it. I'm going to remember this ad."

Robinson, who had already alienated Republican allies like Jack Kemp with his approach to immigration, issued more commercials blasting the Democrat for voting against a border wall or a cutoff on benefits for undocumented workers. One radio ad set Miller-bashing lyrics to the Beverly Hillbillies theme ("Come and hear me tell about a politician named Brad. He gave illegal aliens everything we had!"). The Democrats were spooked, even before the influential political magazine Congressional Quarterly pondered the tone of the campaign and increased its odds for a Robinson upset.

"Both myself and my opponent thought it was going to be a photo finish," Robinson remembers. "He wouldn't have stood in rain for two hours on Election Day if he thought it wouldn't be close."

If so, both men were wrong. The Democrat, who had won 59 percent of the vote in 2004, thumped the well-funded Robinson by 28 points. After a year in which the immigration issue inspired reform bills, citizen border patrols, mass marches of undocumented workers, and...

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