A little advice for President Bush: Watch your rhetoric against opponents of the immigration bill. Be understanding of those who oppose it. Why? Well, in part, because they include some of the people who still love you — and that band is not getting any bigger.

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I give the above advice even though I’m mindful of the old line about what free advice is worth.

And here is one more admonition: Not everyone who opposes the immigration bill is blind to the need to have some sort of solution — a solution to our immigration problems. Not everyone has his head in the sand.

Yes, we should not let the perfect be the enemy of the good. But “enforcement first” — and enforcement for real — is pretty good too.

You have heard the latest from Hillary Rodham Clinton (or has she reverted to plain old “Hillary Clinton,” now that she’s running for president?). I quote the AP: “The Democratic senator said what the Bush administration touts as an ‘ownership society’ really is an ‘on your own’ society that has widened the gap between rich and poor.”

Here was Hillary’s crowning touch: “I prefer a ‘we’re all in it together’ society.”

Uh-oh. When you hear rhetoric like that, guard your wallet, because it amounts to an apologia for socialism. A leader like Hillary comes in blasting “you’re on your own,” and touting “we’re all in it together.” They make themselves feel good through redistributionist and collectivist policies. And then the rest of the country feels bad — because such policies always impoverish and block.

Whereupon a free-marketeer has to come in and save the day, as always.

On a memorable Firing Line, WFB asked Jeane Kirkpatrick whether she could explain the continuing appeal of socialism in the Third World — despite the manifest failure of socialism. She said, in essence, “Because of the power of its rhetoric”: Socialist rhetoric is simply more appealing, to many, than the words free-market economics can offer up. All free-market economics can offer is: prosperity, general and specific.

Remember how the late Jerry Falwell defined socialism? “Shared misery.” I used to scoff when he said that. Of course, I was about 16.

I guess, under Hillary, you can kiss Social Security reform goodbye. Then again, it never had a chance under George W. Bush — because the Republican party, and conservatives generally, may I say, lacked the guts and sense to back him adequately.

Did you catch this story about Mitt Romney?

DOVER, N.H. (AP) — Mitt Romney’s visit to New Hampshire started on a sour note Tuesday when a restaurant patron declared he would not vote for the Republican presidential contender because of his faith.

“I’m one person who will not vote for a Mormon,” Al Michaud of Dover shouted at Romney when the former Massachusetts governor approached him inside Harvey’s Bakery. . . .

Romney kept smiling as he asked, “Can I shake your hand anyway?”

Michaud replied, “No.”

I like Mitt Romney — like him a lot.

I like George W. Bush a lot, too. Did you hear what he said about the ROTC — or rather, about universities that ban ROTC from their campuses? “It should not be hard for our great schools of learning to find room to honor the service of men and women who are standing up to defend the freedoms that make the work of our universities possible.”

Perfect. That’s my Bush.

And to be partisan for a moment (or another moment, you might say): Can you imagine a Democratic president ever saying that?

The 2008 election is not unimportant.

Like you, I’m sure, I want an honorable and noble society, one that treats even its worst enemies decently. But we have already extended unprecedented privileges — and they are privileges, not rights — to the enemy noncombatants at Guantanamo. And the Democrats are wanting to do even more. As the AP reports, “Senate Democrats are backing a bill that would grant new rights to terror suspects . . ., including access to a lawyer regardless of whether the prisoners are put on trial.”

What’s next? Foot massages and back rubs? There is a line across which honor and generosity become a kind of societal sickness.