Wishful Plotting For the Next Round

After the Senate bill was stopped cold, Tamar Jacoby, a conservative Republican who helped to organize the movement to support it, went for a stiff drink and a few hours sleep. Then Ms. Jacoby returned for more Washington meetings for gloomy post-mortems and a little wishful plotting about what might come next.

Ms. Jacoby, 52, went from desk-chair intellectual to phone-calling door-knocking advocate in the last few years, after reading about illegal immigrants who died in the Arizona desert trying to cross into the United States.

For her, defeat came at the hands of American voters from her conservative camp who, she acknowledged, did better at galvanizing their forces.

“The polls show that the public supports a practical answer to immigration,” she said. “We just didn’t tap into those sentiments as well to sell the compromise.”

Ms. Jacoby, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative research group in New York, helped organize business people, who are often hesitant to come forward, into groups in 13 states supporting the Senate package. Their button-down appeals were no match for the scorching radio, television and Internet blitz by the opponents.

“Amnesty is a bumper sticker,” she said, using the word that opponents used to tar the bill as rewarding illegal immigrant lawbreakers. “We had a complicated compromise to defend. Some of us were ambivalent about it. They didn’t have an ounce of ambivalence.” JULIA PRESTON