The Pulse: Gingrich's immigration test

One week ago today, I arose before dawn and went to buy coffee and a newspaper at a southwest Florida 7-Eleven. I was the lone white guy in a convenience store jammed with Latinos wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the names of lawn services whose trucks packed the parking lot. This was Black Friday, but none of these guys was going shopping. They were soon to manicure the lawns of one of the most prosperous, politically conservative communities in a swing state.

The local paper brought news of a campaign appearance by Newt Gingrich, the GOP presidential front-runner, just three days after a debate in which he'd proposed a "humane" approach to illegal immigration. For a political junkie like me, that's better than a day at the beach.

So later that afternoon, literally across the street from the 7-Eleven, I went to hear Gingrich defend his views in front of a crowd at the Hilton hotel in Naples that looked nothing like the one I'd encountered earlier in the day. I was eager to see if the former House speaker could sell his humane approach, or if he'd go the way of Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who tanked after defending tuition breaks for the children of illegals.

At a foreign-policy debate in Washington, Gingrich had said: "If you're here - if you've come here recently, you have no ties to this country, you ought to go home, period. If you've been here 25 years and you got three kids and two grandkids, you've been paying taxes and obeying the law, you belong to a local church, I don't think we're going to separate you from your family, uproot you forcefully, and kick you out."

Immediately there was reaction from Michele Bachmann ("Well, I don't agree that you would make 11 million workers legal, because that, in effect, is amnesty") and Mitt Romney ("Look, amnesty is a magnet").

Gingrich stood his ground: "I don't see how the - the party that says it's the party of the family is going to adopt an immigration policy which destroys families that have been here a quarter-century. And I'm prepared to take the heat for saying, Let's be humane."

But could he sell that to an older white crowd in Gov. Rick Scott's hometown? The answer was yes, but only after he tempered what he'd suggested at the debate.