Here is a good example of the drift of the Democratic Party. Steve Levy, the executive of Suffolk County, NY (that would be over on Long Island for the non-New Yorkers) is a Democrat. And he’s making himself a political reputation by going after illegal immigrants. In a piece today in The New York Times, Levy flexes his tough-on-crime, anti-immigrant bonafides:

If politicians can be said to have relationships with issues, Mr. Levy’s relationship with illegal immigration seems resentful yet clinging.

He complains that immigration detracts from his local accomplishments.

Yet he injects himself into the issue often and aggressively enough to have become almost as familiar to the national audiences of action-figure conservative commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs as he is to viewers of News 12 Long Island.

Newsday calls him arguably the most formidable elected official in Long Island history. Immigrants advocates frequently accuse him of bigotry; one spokesman for local day laborers, the Rev. Allan Ramirez, has accused him of “ethnic cleansing.”

    So, is this the new Democratic triangulation? If Bill Clinton’s political maneuvering to bolster his political career–at the expense of the Democratic Party, I might add (elected Democrats at all levels were objectively smaller and shrinking during Clinton’s two terms–focused on welfare “reform” and trade, then, it appears as if politicians like Levy believe they can prosper by targeting the new “enemy.” During Clinton’s years it was “welfare mothers”; today it’s illegal immigrants.

At his most strident, Mr. Levy warns that the country’s “open borders” are an invitation to “Fort Dix terrorists,” a reference to the six foreign-born men, three of them with expired visas, who were charged in May with plotting to attack an Army base in New Jersey.

    And so far it’s working in one way: he has been endorsed for re-election by the Democratic and Republican parties. Ugh.