President Obama's chief political strategist, David Plouffe, made the rounds of most of the Sunday public affair shows to talk up the president's agenda — and that meant defending the Obama administration's announcement that it would stop deporting illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as a child.
The announcement was a political home run for Obama, and the question since Friday has been how would Mitt Romney respond? Romney has been getting creamed by Obama among Latino voters all year long, a deficit that he has previously admitted "spells doom for us."
Plouffe insisted it wasn't just a political act, and that Congress still needed to support the DREAM Act which would be a more comprehensive plan to deal with immigrant youth. "Congress hasn't acted," he told NBC's David Gregory on Meet The Press. "This is an enforcement decision. And so we need a permanent solution. We are a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants. The president has often said those things don't need to be in conflict."
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This article appears in Jun 14-20, 2012.