MICKEY KAUS: Rick Perry’s Big Mistake:

It’s always about respect. Telling voters who worry about illegal immgration that they don’t “have a heart” is dissing, not disagreeing. If Rick Perry had said “I’m sorry, I understand the arguments against it but I just don’t have the heart to tell those kids ‘no,’ and I don’t think we should do that as a society. There’s a place for compassion,” I don’t think his debate remark would have stirred up nearly as much resentment, though substantively it would have amounted to the same thing. . . . Perry may have phrased it the way he did because he doesn’t see his tuition stand as a compassionate exception to an otherwise rigorous system of border enforcement. He sees it as part of a full-throated, emotional ethnic pander that will to help him in the general election. Too bad he might not get there. …

Much more at the link.

UPDATE: Reader Frank Hujber writes: “Yeah but if he uses that word ‘compassion,’ he’s going to sound WAY too much like G.W. Bush for the tastes of any conservative.”