Lincoln Diaz-Balart: "Obama was absolutely AWOL" on immigration
Lincoln Diaz-Balart assailed Barack Obama's record on immigration, saying on a John McCain campaign conference call that Obama was "absolutely AWOL" when Congress was trying to hash out a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.

"As a House member I was involved in many of the meetings where Senator McCain was leading the effort and Senator Obama was consistently and absolutely AWOL, nowhere to be seen in any of the meetings we had," Diaz-Balart said. "It's absurd for him now to try to take credit when he was nowhere to be seen."

In remarks prepared for an afternoon speech before an influential Hispanic group, Obama is to say he admired McCain for his efforts to "buck his party" and support sweeping immigration reform. But he accuses McCain of backtracking amid GOP opposition.

"When he was running for his party’s nomination, he abandoned his courageous stance, and said that he wouldn’t even support his own legislation if it came up for a vote," Obama said in the prepared remarks. "Well, for eight long years, we’ve had a President who made all kinds of promises to Latinos on the campaign trail, but failed to live up to them in the White House, and we can’t afford that anymore. We need a President who isn’t going to walk away from something as important as comprehensive reform when it becomes politically unpopular."

Diaz-Balart called those charges bunk.

"It's not a change in position," Diaz-Balart said of McCain's recent emphasis on first securing the border.

"It's a recognition that the American people did not trust us to get it done," Diaz-Balart said. He maintains Obama will have a tough time wooing Hispanics because of his stances on taxes and his opposition to free trade agreements.

"He is basically not known by the Hispanic community," he said.

ATTENTION OBAMA