OPINION

In an election year, children are a political issue | Cotterell

Bill Cotterell
Democrat correspondent

Put aside the legal considerations involved in the immigration crisis unfolding on America’s southwestern border, forget for the moment the moral implications of separating children from parents, and one big question remains.

Who is advising this administration? What political consultants held high-level strategy sessions in the Oval Office, paid for secret polling across the nation, and advised President Trump or the Republican National Committee that the best way to roll back an approaching “blue wave” at the polls is to amass lots of pictures of frightened, crying little kids?

“Mr. President, our research indicates our party has an image of rich racists who don’t care about poor people,” some high-priced consultant must have told Trump. “We think the best way to change that is to put children on mattresses in cages and lie about it as much as possible.”

Brilliant. Surely no chief executive got such wise counsel since Nixon was advised not to destroy those tape recordings. Or when Clinton’s inner circle said nobody cared about the women. Or maybe when Carter’s crew told him not to worry about the guy he once dismissed as “the governor from Death Valley Days.”

Reagan, the old movie actor, used to remind everybody to remember the “visuals” presented by any event or issue. Sure, the laws and the policies are important, but facts and figures don’t go to the gut like the “optics” of a person or thing. With Elian Gonzalez in 2000, the law was clear and obvious – he had to go back to his father in Cuba – but that picture of a green-clad agent with a rifle removing the screaming boy from a closet was what everyone remembers.

Trump backed down Wednesday, suddenly discovering he can stop family separation by executive order instead of waiting for Congress to act. But the political damage was done.

The refugee crisis affects congressional and gubernatorial candidates all over the country -- nowhere more than in Gov. Rick Scott’s race against U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson. You may have heard that Florida has a lot of Hispanic voters, who care about immigration. Ditto women, who trend against the Trump policy in recent polls.

With a ham-fisted stupidity that would make Vladimir Putin wince, Nelson and U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz were turned away from a Homestead detention center this week. Hey, trust us, the kids are fine, the Trump administration is saying – would we lie?

“This is shameful,” Nelson said in a statement afterward. “The Trump administration wants to stop the public from seeing how these children are being treated here in Florida and at our southern border.”

Gwen Graham, Andrew Gillum, Charlie Crist, Al Lawson – the Democrats were gleefully piling on, in congressional and statewide races all over Florida. Republicans have to be careful distancing themselves from the Trump separation policy without appearing to criticize the touchy president. Just a week ago, they saw what happened to soon-to-be-former Congressman Mark Sanford of South Carolina, who had shown signs of a spine and drew Trump’s wrath.

Scott seemed painfully aware of this.

“I have been very clear that I absolutely do not agree with the practice of separating children from their families,” Scott wrote to Health and Human Services Secretary Alex Azar II. “This practice needs to stop now.”

But the rest of the governor’s letter was hedged as much as possible. It noted that facilities like the one in Homestead “are 100 percent controlled and operated by the federal government,” and that the detention policy was authorized by a 2008 law all Florida members of Congress – including Nelson – had supported.

“It is extremely frustrating that, after decades of inaction by the federal government, many innocent children are now paying the price for the failures of Washington,” the governor wrote. “Congress must address our immigration system immediately.”

It was a very delicately worded letter, stating Scott’s opposition to the separation policy while blaming Congress rather than Trump for it. And that reference to “decades of inaction” – well, who’s been in Congress for decades?

Images are easy to acquire and hard to shake in a four-month campaign, regardless of facts.

We can count on Nelson and the rest of the Democrats to pound Scott and the Republicans with images of desperate mothers and crying children, to keep visiting to detention centers – hoping the feds will keep on turning them away. And we can expect Scott to keep on blaming Congress, and try not to mention the president who started the crisis.

Bill Cotterell is a retired Tallahassee Democrat reporter who writes a twice-weekly column. He can be reached atbcotterell@tallahassee.com .