Rove or Card are the likely 'leakers'...with full Prez approval. Hence, whether merely a 'trial balloon' or an anticipatory leak to create 'buzz' for the Prez so he can take 'credit' for the positive voter response the brain trust is hoping will result.
It is not hard to see where, in purely Machiavellian (i.e., triangulating) terms, they are coming from: They are trying to head off the growing juggernaut of the Mexifornian vote and co-opt them from the RATS. It would appear that the strategy of trying to 'appease' the rabble-rousers among the Mexicali rights crowd has not worked for the last 3 years. GWB is drawing, selectively, the wrong lessons from his experience in Texas. These illegals will not suddenly...or even in our lifetime...switch parties. They are coming from a solidly adverse national mind-set that has grown increasingly anti-American in its biasses. Re-orienting these 'Mexican Patriots' into anything approaching 'Republican' will be a much bigger problem than he or Rove concieves. They have an entitlement mentality. Zogby did a poll of Mexicans. About 65% think they are entitled to cross the border into the U.S. Southwest...that they 'own it', and that U.S. national claims are 'illegitimate'. By going down this 'Open Border' slippery slope...and playing to this festering Mexican political malignancy, GWB is rushing the U.S. into either a possibly calamitous confrontation with a neighbor that may become open hostility, or may result in the unthinkable...subversion and guerrilla war, perhaps secessionist insurrections in the SouthWest. If we were simply four-square for defending our sovereignty...and our laws...we would restore the proper respect of our neighbors to the south. Leniency, as do all appeasements, only back-fires.
It doesn't take much googling to find Mexico's corrupt government's policy of "Mexican diaspora" or "nation without borders." The extremist Mexicans here speak of their "homeland" and pro-Mexican mainstream Democrats like Art Torres brag about the "defeated" Prop 187 being the "last gasp of white America."
BTW, looks like Prop 187 is back next Nov. The orginal was never defeated in the courts. Gov. Davis refused to defend the voters who passed it and abandoned former governor Wilson's appeal of the lowest court's ruling. That sparked the first recall of Davis effort in 1999. We finally got him out this year. Who's next?
I bet Prop 187 II gets more votes here than President Bush -- unless he gives up kowtowing to his bud Vicente and brushing aside our sovereignty.