Here’s a simple word cloud comparison of Congressman McKeon’s outreach emails to constituents before and after the January and February Save Our State rallies in Santa Clarita. The size of the word indicates how often McKeon used the word in his emails and public statements:
Before the Rallies:
Created from 15,323 words in 77 outreach emails from 2/9/2009 to January. Emails are in my inbox
As you can see, before January, McKeon hardly ever mentioned illegal immigration. Nor would we expect him to mention it much because his primary post in Congress is as Ranking Member of the Armed Services Committee.
But now that he’s in campaign mode, it looks like illegal immigration is going to be a major theme.
After the Rallies:
Here’s a word cloud of his 500+ word statement yesterday announcing his reelection:
Created from his email yesterday announcing his reelection effort. "Immigrants" and "Immigration" are two of the largest words
I suppose you could say McKeon is pandering to the base for pivoting so dramatically from defense and national security issues to illegal immigration. But then again, I think the blow-up in Santa Clarita over illegal immigration in January and February was real and reflected uncertainties and fears about the economy in general.
Indeed, it seems McKeon is going to exploit those fears and uncertainties. Since the rallies, he’s also signed on to a number of controversial bills that would strip citizenship from babies born in the US to illegal immigrant parents and deny in-state tuition fees to illegal immigrant students who have lived here for much of their lives.
No matter that those bills have zero chance of passing (or in the case of one, Amending the Constitution), they will be used by McKeon during the campaign to show that he is doing something about illegal immigration.
McKeon is obviously listening and probably got a lot of push-back from constituents after he called for Bob Kellar to apologize.
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Could we PLEASE get a qualified challenger?
PLEASE!!!
Everyone knows McKeon is worthless, always has been even on City Council. Every time McKeon runs, he finds someone else’s bandwaggon, hops aboard at the last minute and takes credit for inventing the wheel. But this is a Republican territory and a joke like McKeon continually gets elected because nothing much better runs against him, or has the money to compete against an entrenched incumbent that panders for votes from all the charities and various organizations by getting them some pork barrel pocket change every once in awhile.
This time, McKeon must know people’s disgust with him is at an all-time high after the dirty tricks he pulled pushing an unqualified idiot like Laurie Ender onto our City Council. Even Republicans are sick of McKeon always backing the least qualified candidates running for public office. I wouldn’t vote for Meg Whitman based only on her McKeon support. McKeon has been ripped apart for sticking his beak into this city’s politics and now he will hop on the illegal immigrant bandwaggon and hope this topic will be so important to people they will forget what he did to this city in the last election, and forget what he hasn’t done anywhere for more than a dozen years. But, there’s no getting rid of this moron until redistricting changes the political layout of this region. Then the incompetent do-nothing will retire.