With those words, Martinez inflicted multiple wounds on whatever slender chance she had to join the national ticket. First, she indicated support for the immigration agenda that President Obama promises to pursue if he defeats Romney in November. Second, the reforms the 43-year-old first-term Republican favors are opposed by every Republican member of the Senate (even those like John McCain, who used to support it) and a solid majority in the House. (In case there was any doubt, the same day Martinez’s interview appeared, Politico reported that the Romney campaign was seeking a “boring white guy” as a running mate.)

Martinez had previously said she wasn’t interested in a place on the Republican ticket. Her comments certainly indicate she isn’t interested in the public posturing necessary to achieve it.

On immigration reform, Martinez said she favors:

an approach “with multiple levels”: increased border security; deportation for criminals; a guest-worker program for people who want “to go freely back and forth across the border to work”; a DREAM Act-style pathway to citizenship, through the military or college, for children brought here illegally by their parents; and a visa (coupled with a “penalty” or a “tagback”) that allows rest of the illegal population to remain in the U.S. while they follow standard naturalization procedures.

In conversation, Martinez slagged Romney’s advocacy of “self-deportation” for the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the United States.

“‘Self-deport?’ What the heck does that mean?” she snapped.

Martinez is not the only person asking. As articulated by Romney during the primary season,”self-deportation” means making life so miserable for the undocumented that they will “voluntarily” leave the country. Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and Romney advisor, told me he thought the United States could remove 5.5 million “illegal aliens” by the end of the first Romney administration.

As John McCain and others have pointed out, a GOP campaign promise to forcibly evict millions of Americans from their homes is neither attractive nor practical as an appeal to Latino voters, the fastest-growing group in the American electorate.

Martinez suggested Romney needed a more attractive message.

“I have no doubt Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign,” she said. “But now there’s an opportunity for Governor Romney to have a sincere conversation about what we can do and why.”

Impolitic to the end, Martinez expressed skepticism about Sen. Marco Rubio’s much-hyped but still vague idea of GOP variation on the DREAM Act. Rubio, with Romney’s tacit blessing, is seeking to moderate the Republicans’ reputation on immigration by developing a DREAM Act-style measure that would protect undocumented young people from deportation without giving them citizenship.

Politicians, Martinez said, cannot “fix [immigration] by saying, ‘Here’s the DREAM Act and we’re done.’ It has to be part of a larger plan.”

In other words, the New Mexico governor is that now-rare national Republican figure who favors comprehensive immigration reform, otherwise known as amnesty. Martinez would open the illegal immigrant’s path to citizenship that Marco Rubio avoids and that most Republicans seek to block. She probably won’t be Mitt Romney’s running mate. But Susana Martinez will be heard.

“This is what immigration reform under Obama has gotten us,” says Abdollahi, who traveled to Tacoma to rally public attention to Luna’s case. “The right to spend up to $5,000 to get a loved one out of jail. When Obama says he isn’t deporting dreamers, he’s lying.”

“Marco Rubio is being a lot more authentic with us,” Abdollahi added.

The positive response of young immigrants  to Rubio’s still-vague alternative to the Democrats’ DREAM Act is central to the changing politics of immigration in the 2012 presidential campaign. In a series of meetings in Washington, Rubio is shopping for support, hoping to put forward a legislative proposal in the next few weeks. The Washington Post endorsed the idea on Monday.

By flirting with Rubio, the DREAM activists — representing an estimated 1 million young Americans, or “dreamers,” who are now barred from a path to U.S. citizenship — have wrong-footed the Obama White House and given pause to reelection campaign officials who had been counting on Latinos to fall in line with the president’s reelection. They have also caught the interest of Republican strategists worried about Romney’s narrowing path for victory in November.

Rubio is expected to propose the creation of a non-immigrant visa that would ensure undocumented young people who don’t have criminal records would not be deported and could eventually become citizens. The original DREAM Act failed to pass  the Senate in 2010.

“We are going to support whoever will come out and talk about the issue,” said Gabby Pacheco, a 26-year-old special education teacher from Miami and DREAM Act activist. “Rubio realizes this is key for us. Even if he is only doing it for political reasons, we’re willing to listen.”

The dreamers are backed by Latino Democrats on Capitol Hill, who feel betrayed by the Obama administration’s boasts of deporting a record annual average of 400,000 people over the last four years. After a friendly if inconclusive meeting with Rubio, Rep. Luis Gutierrez of Illinois told Politico his liberal allies  accused him of being the Florida senator’s new “best friend.”

The Obama White House hates the idea. Last week, presidential advisors Celia Munoz and Valerie Jarrett tried to discourage the dreamers from embracing Rubio’s proposal, saying it put at risk the original DREAM Act, which laid out a specific path to citizenship. According to the Washington Post, they had a meeting with DREAM Act-eligible students in Washington, arguing that “Rubio had not demonstrated he could win support from fellow Republicans and that the president would use his clout to push an immigration plan next year. ”

Pacheco, who attended the meeting, was not impressed with the White House appeal.

“You can’t wait until next year if you’re getting deported this year,” she said.  She described the White House officials as “very strategic” in their opposition to Rubio. She said the dreamers asked Munoz and Jarrett if the president could stop the deportations by taking administrative action that would not need to be approved by Congress, as Florida immigration activist Cheryl Little recently wrote in the Miami Herald.

“The thing that surprised us was they said no,” Pacheco told me. “They said, practically, ‘We don’t have the power to do this.’We’re trying to find out if that is true.”

It isn’t true, says Laura Lichter, an attorney in Denver and president-elect of the American Immigration Lawyer’s Association.

“The Obama administration  could certainly be doing more and better to improve the situation for DREAM Act students and to make immigration law and policy predictable and fair for everybody,” Lichter said in a telephone interview. “Whether they’re willing to do that in any way that might look like reasonable treatment for the undocumented remains to be seen.”

Presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney, who has advocated “self-deportation” for the likes of Abdollahi and Luna and the estimated 1 million DREAM Act-eligible students, is noncommittal about Rubio’s idea. Romney’s hard-line immigration advisor, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, initially rejected the suggestion as “amnesty,” but has more recently said he can “work with” the Florida senator, a nod to the growing realization that running on a platform of “self-deportation” is Romney’s ticket to self-destruction among Latino voters in November.

Whether Rubio’s gambit can sway Republican votes on Capitol Hill is doubtful. House Speaker John Boehner described passage of such a bill this year as “difficult at best.” Helping the undocumented is not a priority for most non-Latino voters, according to Republican pollster Scott Rasmussen.

While elite Republicans like Haley Barbour have said positive things about Rubio’s idea, the conservative blogosphere is notably unenthusiastic. The Weekly Standard touted Rubio’s recent foreign policy speech while ignoring his much-publicized idea of helping young undocumented Americans closer to home. The National Review hyped Rubio as a Romney running mate without taking a stand  on his proposal “to give the children of illegal immigrants a visa to continue their studies.” Talk radio stalwarts like Rush Limbaugh and Hugh Hewitt have yet to mention Rubio’s plan, while Mickey Kaus, the Daily Caller’s anti-immigrant blogger, notes conservative intellectuals can only agree to disagree on the issue.

If the Republicans’ intellectual base seems stumped by Rubio’s gambit, the Democratic incumbent comes off as arrogant. In a recent interview with Telemundo, President Obama said:

This notion that somehow Republicans want to have it both ways — they want to vote against these laws [like Arizona and Alabama] and appeal to anti-immigrant sentiment … and then they come and say, ‘But we really care about these kids and we want to do something about it’ — that looks like hypocrisy to me.

To the dreamers, Obama is just as hypocritical. “A lot of folks want us to be against  it,” Abdollahi said. “At the same time we hear from Obama administration that they’re not deporting dreamers. They’re tricking us. That’s what makes us supportive of Rubio.”

If nothing else, the events indicate Rubio is auditioning to become the new Richard Lugar: the Democrats’ favorite Republican. His speech to an overflowing audience at the Brookings Institution was announced by an email from Martin Indyk, who served as assistant secretary of state under President Clinton and has positive things to say about President Obama. Rubio was first introduced by Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state under Clinton, and then introduced some more by independent Joe Lieberman, the former Democrat whose voting record is still more liberal than that of every senate Republican.

Rubio started out by tweaking Republicans who favor withdrawal from Afghanistan and oppose intervention in Libya. In his first year in the senate, Rubio said,

I found myself partnering with Democrats like Bob Menendez and Bob Casey on a more forceful foreign policy. In fact,  resolutions that I co-authored with Senator Casey condemning Assad and with Senator Menendez condemning fraudulent elections in Nicaragua were held up by Republicans. I recently joked that today, in the U.S. Senate, on foreign policy, if you go far enough to the right, you wind up on the left.

He repeatedly name-checked Brookings fellow Bob Kagan, author of the best-selling book “The World America Made,” which President Obama has praised and which emphasizes the continuity of U.S. foreign policy between Democratic and Republican presidents. Rubio even had a kind word for the United Nations, an institution that he said was established “to spread peace and prosperity, not to assert narrow American interests.”

His criticisms of Obama came with a bipartisan tinge. While acknowledging that the administration’s emphasis on international coalitions was “correct,” he chided Obama for lack of leadership.

Effective international coalitions don’t form themselves. They need to be instigated and led, and more often than not, they can only be instigated and led by us. And that is what this administration doesn’t understand.

And then he added, “This concept is neither novel nor partisan. President Clinton acted exactly in this way in Kosovo with the support of congressional leaders like Senator Lieberman.”

It wasn’t until he got around to talking about Iran that Rubio sounded a theme that might as easily have been heard during a Republican presidential primary debate, and even then he cast the idea in terms of caution and multilateralism, qualities not often heard in election-year GOP discourse:

We should also be preparing our allies, and the world, for the reality that unfortunately, if all else fails, preventing a nuclear Iran may require a military solution.

On Syria, he came close to calling for arming the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad, as John McCain, Joe Lieberman, and four other Republican senators have done. But with a single word, he took care not to commit himself to another war.

Forming and leading a coalition with Turkey and the Arab League nations to assist the opposition, by creating a safe haven and equipping the opposition with food, medicine, communications tools and potentially weapons [emphasis added]

His praise of former President George W. Bush was circumspect. He did not repeat his recent assertion that Bush did “a fantastic job.” He did not repeat the dubious neoconservative talking point (some say “lie”) that Bush’s “freedom agenda” inspired the Arab Spring. Rather, he praised Bush for increasing funding for the fight against AIDS in Africa, a cause dear to some evangelicals but not to many others on the right. And he never once mentioned the de rigueur conservative trope of “American exceptionalism.”

Rubio lost the last page of his speech — no teleprompter jokes, please — but gracefully recovered by closing with a quote from Tony Blair, a Clintonian social democrat. Those expecting Republican red meat found themselves served with bipartisan veal.

Rubio’s audience was Washington elites, not the Republican base. In conjunction with his independent stance on immigration, Rubio’s speech veered so far from Republican orthodoxy circa 2012 as to almost disqualify him as Romney’s running mate, at least in the eyes of a suspicious conservative base. Rubio has said that he doesn’t want to be vice president and doesn’t expect to be asked. The ambitions of his speech belied the former claim even as the details underscored the plausibility of the latter.

Rubio is positioning himself as a compassionate conservative and internationalist, a profile that will serve him well with the media. And his well-buffed bipartisan image will serve him even better if Romney loses.

Is “Rubio angling for Obama second term Secy State?” tweeted Yahoo News’ Laura Rozen facetiously. No, he’s angling for another job in 2016.

The trick in the gimmick became clear this week when Brown announced that he was holding up his end of the pledge, agreeing to pay half the costs of an ad from a group called Coalition of Americans for Political Equality (CAPE PAC) and asking it to pull its Google ads promoting him. The group’s website is now offline. Jeff Loyd, a Tea Party activist from Arizona who chairs the PAC, confirmed that his group spent all of $673.99 in pro-Brown online advertising with Google.

Brown’s ostentatious willingness to be the first to trigger the enforcement mechanism against himself displays a street-smart opportunism that the Warren camp, for all her populist credentials, lacks. Far from shooting himself in the foot, the penalty amounts to $327 out of the $13 million in his campaign coffers. It was money well spent to help burnish his image as a moderate and man of the people, even as he raises more than $2 for Warren’s every $1. (Warren has raised $6 million to date.)

“Sen. Brown is a man of his word,” Brown’s campaign manager, Jim Barnett, trumpeted in a letter to CAPE PAC. “And as a result of your advertising on his behalf, he will honor the agreement by paying out of his campaign account an amount equal to 50 percent of your spending. In short,” the letter continued, “while your advertising on his behalf is clearly intended to be helpful, it is actually costing his campaign valuable resources.”

Mike Huckabee! Glenn Beck! Rush Limbaugh! That time Time magazine called him an “influential evangelical” even though he’s a Catholic and therefore not actually an evangelical Christian! Sarah Palin! The Wall Street Journal!

I have a couple of thoughts on this.

First, those little tildes instead of em dashes for the quote attributions are bugging me. It makes all the quotes look like message board signatures. Second, the Santorum logo is pretty funny. The “O” sun that the eagle is blocking is too small or something, and it looks like this is an ad for Rick Sant Rum.

Also, obviously, if blurbs from Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck make you more inclined to support a candidate, you are basically the sort of person who sums up why America is broken and ungovernable.

Many of these positive quotes came from when Rick Santorum was a fringe candidate polling in the single digits, and they can best be understood as an attempt to be polite to the guy (Palin, a Gingrich enabler, is offering him faint praise here), or, alternately, attempts to damage Romney back when it was still possible for a new acceptable-to-the-elites candidate to enter the race (that was the point of the Journal’s inexplicable attacks on Romney’s perfectly supply-sidey tax plan). But none of that matters now! Rick Santorum will make everyone regret saying nice things about him back when they thought he’d go away after Iowa. (Except Glenn Beck, who probably does think Rick Santorum is likely the next George Washington, even though nothing about that makes any sort of sense, at all.)

Santorum will also maybe make Mitt Romney regret focusing all of his attention (money) on Newt Gingrich. Here’s Santorum’s other, better new ad, in which a creepy Romney lookalike (more a George Romney lookalike, actually?) shoots … “mud” at a Rick Santorum Fathead in that abandoned building from the end of “The Departed.”

George Romney looks so sad when he gets mud on his nice shirt, at the end! (He is also a horrible shot!) Also is Romney just doing target practice with these cutouts or is Santorum tricking him with decoys? It is not entirely clear. (And what does cap-and-trade have to do with anything?) But this ad is much better than the other one, because it is disgusting and odd instead of boring.

It is also, obviously, a negative attack ad attacking another candidate for airing negative attack ads, because an important aspect of the modern political campaign is constantly acting as wounded as possible for any reason at all while calling attention to your opponent’s total lack of basic human decency. Santorum is adept at playing the aggrieved victim (Google and homosexuals are so mean to him!) though he’s practically preempting Romney’s actual attack on Santorum, which didn’t really begin in earnest until, like, yesterday. Still, the important thing is that Santorum has reached the “hiring an impersonator of your opponent” stage, and there is no turning back now. (Next stop: comparing your opponent to a possessed sheep.)

At the National Review’s Katrina Trinko points out, Santorum has bought $41,000 in airtime in Michigan, compared to Romney’s $824,000. So Santorum needs the sillier gimmicky ads, like a Romney doppelganger firing a shit-rifle in a warehouse, to go “viral.” (We’re helping, Rick!) The best way to get free media pickup is to be extremely outrageous and/or shameless, so it’s all downhill from here, in terms of tone. Especially because Santorum’s lead is extremely precarious and based in large part on his not being Gingrich or Romney, both of whom voters now think of as detestable assholes, because of the ads they both ran against each other. (So be careful, Rick!)