Is Rahm racist, or merely scared?

It's got to be one or the other, because Rahm Emanuel is behind efforts to build Democratic support for the Shuler/Tancredo "enforcement-only" bill currently winding its way through the House.

Think about it -- our House leadership is strong-arming Democrats into backing a bill which is the central agenda of the biggest racist xenophobe Tom Tancredo.

Ironically, Rahm's efforts come at a time when Republicans seem to have taken a step back on their immigration-bashing, just days after losing their second election in a row with immigration front-and-center in their campaigns:

Just three days after their 2nd consecutive election where a massive investment in demonizing immigrants did not pay off their Party, the leading GOP Presidential candidates have agreed to participate in a December Univision debate in Miami. There is simply no way to read this action as anything but a national repudiation of their extreme anti-immigrant strategy of recent years, and a desperate attempt to beg the Hispanic community for forgiveness.

Remember -- this is a Spanish-language debate. Think about that and savor it for a moment. The xenophobic nativists won't be pleased.

And why are Republicans coming to their sense?

The one point on which [Virginia Republican] moderates and conservatives seem to agree is that their party overplayed the illegal immigration issue. "They went for a magic bullet with immigration, and it didn't work," says a conservative strategist who doesn't want his name used because his clients don't agree that immigration is a losing issue. Prince William County board Chairman Corey Stewart, the strategist says, "won last year as the anti-tax and anti-growth candidate, and he ended up in the same place this year. He pushed hard on immigration, but it didn't move his numbers" in his reelection victory Tuesday.

Moderates say harsh rhetoric on immigration repelled independent voters. Northern Virginians "know this crackdown on illegal immigration was posturing," Potts says.

Former White House speechwriter Michael Gerson saw the writing on the wall two months ago:

I have never seen an issue [immigration] where the short-term interests of Republican presidential candidates in the primaries were more starkly at odds with the long-term interests of the party itself. At least five swing states that Bush carried in 2004 are rich in Hispanic voters -- Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Florida. Bush won Nevada by just over 20,000 votes. A substantial shift of Hispanic voters toward the Democrats in these states could make the national political map unwinnable for Republicans ... Some in the party seem pleased. They should be terrified.

So we won, didn't we? Not according to Rahm and the either bigoted or scared contingent in the House that is ready to -- once again and demonstrably so -- be on the wrong side of the American public on this issue.

Americans don't want hate-based anti-immigration rhetoric and action, they want comprehensive immigration reform that secures our borders and provides a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country.

Yet there's Rahm, with a big chunk of the Democratic caucus, making common cause with racist Tom Tancredo.

The Latino vote is volatile. It swings. And Democrats can't afford to lose 10 percent of their margin over stupidity like this.