POLITICIAN WATCH : About Face

There is an old, and cynical, saying about politics to the effect that the first rule of the game is getting yourself reelected. And we’re grown up enough to know that staying in power is, at times, the main motivation of even the best elected official.

But that doesn’t make it any less sad when a normally principled politician suddenly changes directions almost 180 degrees in a desperate bid to stay in office. Case in point: Rep. Anthony C. Beilenson (D-Los Angeles).

Beilenson has served eight terms in the House, representing the Westside and consistently getting high marks for his hard work, even from opponents. But reapportionment has pushed him from a safe liberal district into a somewhat more conservative area that includes suburban Ventura County. Now the longtime civil rights advocate is co-sponsoring a constitutional amendment that would deny U.S. citizenship to U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants.

Beilenson is too intelligent to pretend that such a mean-spirited measure will somehow end illegal immigration, but he says it may solve “a tiny part� of the problem.

Sorry, congressman, but it won’t even do that. It will only exacerbate the angry emotionalism that too often clouds the debate on an important public-policy question.

Illegal immigration is a complex issue, as a smart fellow like Beilenson well knows.It’s doubly depressing that when Beilenson got into the immigration debate the other day, he started off by pandering to the lowest common denominator.