Posted on 11/22/2005 12:28:26 PM PST by Icelander
WASHINGTON - As Republicans look to the 2008 primaries in search of a candidate whose credentials and personality can triumph over Senator Clinton, one potential candidate has no expectation of winning on the basis of his personality or record - or of winning at all, for that matter. Instead, Rep. Thomas Tancredo, a Republican of Colorado, is hoping that his participation in Iowa's caucuses and early primaries will bring a victory for his signature issue: immigration reform.
He isn't waiting until 2008. Mr. Tancredo, 59, who has earned a national reputation for being an advocate for stricter border controls on Capitol Hill, has yet to make a firm declaration of his candidacy. But he is already making campaign stops from coast to coast and writing a book about immigration, tentatively titled "In Mortal Danger." It could serve as Mr. Tancredo's campaign platform and will be available in June, the congressman told The New York Sun yesterday.
In addition to laying the groundwork for his own bid, Mr. Tancredo is headlining campaign events for others who share his immigration philosophy. Reached yesterday by phone in Orange County, Calif., Mr. Tancredo was campaigning for the founder of the Minuteman Project, James Gilchrist, who is running for the congressional seat vacated by the new chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, Christopher Cox.
Mr. Tancredo has also visited New Hampshire and South Carolina. Bay Buchanan, who is the sister and adviser of another opponent of illegal immigration and former presidential candidate, Patrick Buchanan, has helped Mr. Tancredo make contacts in such early primary states, the congressman said. This weekend, Mr. Tancredo was in Alta, Iowa, on his fourth visit to the crucial caucus state in the last six months.
Mr. Tancredo has said that he will throw his hat into the Iowa ring if no other Republican emerges who will "include immigration in their platform ... and do so with some degree of vigor, "the congressman said yesterday. So far, Mr. Tancredo said a former speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich - who wrote in a recent report for the Center for Immigration Studies that immigrants' dual citizenship posed an "insidious challenge" - has come the closest to being satisfactorily strong on the issue.
Yet Mr. Tancredo appears to enjoy some advantages Mr. Gingrich and his likely 2008 competitors do not, principally the support of an influential Iowa Republican, Rep. Steven King. Mr. King is one of 91 members of the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus, of which Mr. Tancredo is founder and chairman.
"Tom Tancredo needs to keep coming to Iowa," Mr. King said. "I want him on the stage in this debate."
Messrs. Tancredo and King, and the executive director of the Iowa Republican Party, Cullen Sheehan, indicated yesterday that Mr. Tancredo will have a natural base of support among 2008 caucus-goers.
While Iowa is further removed from the issue of illegal immigration than border states such as California and Arizona, Mr. Tancredo said, it has been surprisingly receptive to his message of ending illegal immigration and reducing the number of legal migrants permitted to enter the country. His Iowa audiences, the congressman said, "are as concerned about it as any group I've ever spoken to in Arizona."
Mr. Sheehan said that illegal immigration is a matter of importance to Iowa's caucus-goers, saying that most "want people to obey the law, and they want our government to uphold the laws we have." Mr. King said jobs in the agricultural industry were also a factor, citing as an example the Farmland Foods packing plant in Dennison, Iowa. Ten years ago, Mr. King said, eight Hispanics worked at the facility compared to 850 today.
Iowans, however, are focused mostly on national security: "How can a nation have a border they don't defend?" Mr. King said. "If it's not really a border, then you're not really a nation."
Mr. King said he also anticipated Mr. Tancredo's message to resonate with caucus-goers because of his focus on the cultural effects of massive immigration. Mr. Tancredo said that today's immigrants decline to become Americans, leading to a "balkanized" society. Immigration, Mr. Tancredo said, fuels and reinforces the divisive multiculturalist ideologies propagated by American elites in academia, the press, and politics.
In fact, it was outrage at multiculturalism in American schools that first brought Mr. Tancredo's attention to immigration. The congressman is a former junior high school teacher, and the schools' insistence on bilingual education and hostility toward America in textbooks and classrooms, combined with his reading of Arthur Schlesinger's "The Disuniting of America" in 1992, served as his road-to-Damascus moment on the need for immigration reform, Mr. Tancredo said.
Mr. Tancredo, a Denver native, left teaching to take a seat in Colorado's House of Representatives in 1976, and later served in the federal Department of Education under Presidents Reagan and Bush. In 1998, Mr. Tancredo was elected to Congress.
After founding the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus in 1999, Mr. King said, Mr. Tancredo's "credibility is going up as the American public puts pressure on other members of Congress" on the matter of border security. When Mr. Tancredo first introduced amendments to restrict immigration, Mr. King said, the measures would receive 20 to 25 votes. "Three years ago, that same amendment got 60 to 70 votes. Now, that same amendment will get 100 or 110."
If Mr. Tancredo's star is rising among American voters and in the House, he may not be winning friends in the circles of Republican leadership.
The editor of RealClearPolitics.com, John McIntyre, said yesterday that Mr. Tancredo's candidacy poses "a real problem" for the GOP in 2008.
While the Colorado congressman's message might win votes as a hot-button issue in 2008 and 2012, Mr. McIntyre said, demographic trends suggested the position might prove electoral poison in 2016 and beyond as the American electorate becomes increasingly Hispanic, and if the Tancredo platform paints national Republicans as "anti-immigrant."
For Republicans to succeed in quieting Mr. Tancredo, satisfying the base's yearning for a serious immigration policy, and to avoid being tarred as nativist, it would be necessary for the GOP to nominate a popular candidate with a reputation for being a moderate-such as Senator McCain, of Arizona, or Mayor Giuliani - who would then embrace the issue in the 2008 campaign.
This is facetious, right? Or, are you actually claiming that by electing Bush we have nullified this cabal of politicians? Have you been watching the news lately? They sure seem to be running Congress when put up against the neutered Republicans.
You guys having fun talking to each other?
Ah. The old parade of imaginary horribles with a sense of humor thrown into the process.
In 2016 I'm voting
Might want to wear gloves when voting. Some of the prior voters were undoubtedly Democrat and their platform suggests they engaged in hand activities that are not sanitary.
Let's see about a parade of "horribles" (stated as if such a parade is not already ongoing):
1) Elimination of Dept. of Education to expansion of its budget and agenda.
2) Respect for U.S. Boders to defeatism in the face of illegal immigration.
3) Constant mention of the depravity of abortion (and specific references to it being murder) to barely enough votes to pass parental notification in some states.
4) Sodomy illegal to sodomy ratified by support of domestic partner laws and homosexual adoptions.
5) No smoking near a gas pump to no smoking within 25 ft of the entrance of any public building.
The slope is not always slippery, but there IS a slope, and we are spending much more time sliding down it than working our way back up.
A few years ago the Hawaiian supreme court used that very argument based on their own state ERA to support gay marriage.
It took an act by the Hawaiian legislature to overturn that decision, but it turns out it is too late as we currently see what is going on in Vermont, Massachusetts, etc.
She may seem silly to you, but she was prescient.
I give up, you obviously are not getting my point. Get use to referring to Madam President after 2008 and I don't mean Condi.
I used to be sucked into this faulty thinking myself. I even donated to the Constitution Party. I wish I had my money back. They're flawed humans just like the Republican party. I was offended when Philips ran ads against Bush, not Gore or Kerry.
Philips may not like Bush but the RATS are much worse and he didn't bother talking about the evil of the RATS. Philips is only trying to keep a money flow going. He's not serious about fixing anything. I'll keep my fight in the Republican party, thank you.
I can't stand that flip-floppin' rino McCain. And Rudy is pro-death. I will vote for whomever Tancredo embarrasses into strong stances against open borders and illegal migrants or for Tom himself if he runs. I'm so done with this weak kneed policy on both sides of the platform that I could just spit.
Everyone in the U.S. has the right to habeous corpus no matter how despicable. Only some people have the privilege to drive because only some people have passed their driving test, payed their fees, etc.
If the ERA had passed then women would have all rights that men had, and vice-versa. This would have led inexorably to all men and women having the opportunity to apply for all privileges as well. It would only be a matter of passing tests, paying fees, etc. for women to get all the privileges that men enjoyed.
These privileges would have included being available for Selective Service and any potential military draft. It would also have meant employers having to bend over backwards to allow pregnant women to keep jobs even if those jobs endangered their fetuses.
This of course is all besides the point, but to come to the point. Here is the main text of the ERA:
Equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.
What the liberals supposedly meant by this was to allow women to be firefighters (even though they couldn't haul 250lbs of dead weight), fight in combat, get special consideration on their way to becoming CEO, etc.
However, since we now know that the Constitution is a "living" document we know that the following rationalization (ala Kennedy, Souter, etc.) would most certainly have followed if the ERA had every become law:
1. A man wants to marry a man
2. The only difference between this and a traditional marriage is that one of the participants is a man
3. To deny them the right (or privilege) to marry would be to do so based entirely on the sex of one of the participants.
4. This is a violation of the ERA. Thus gay marriage is AOK in the USA
Phyllis was right and it was a very good thing that the ERA didn't get ratified for more reasons than women in combat, more affirmative action nonsense, etc.
Unfortunately the liberals found other ways to push their agenda and a lot of pubbies are either supporting them or at least not getting in their way much at all.
Your point was not difficult to understand. I personally choose not to vote for someone just because others might. I don't vote for an individual due to electability, based on popularity or group-think. But I appreciate your opinion.
I well remember the "slippery slope" theory, it has been extended to people marrying more than one partner, marrying their pets etc.
I don't totally discount that thinking because I am old enough to remember when divorce was socially looked down upon. It was brought up in Reagan's first campaign for the Presidency. Now with the divorce rate at more than 50% it's just an accepted fact of life.
The birth control pill was controversial at one time too and abortion was not spoken of. Everything changes in society and not always for the better.
Okay, so you would vote for someone totally simpatico with your beliefs with no chance of being elected before voting for someone with some but not all your beliefs that had an excellent chance of being elected.....have I got that right?
So I am supposed to vote for whatever Republican goes up against Hildebeest because I'm supposed to believe that the end times will come if she is elected.
Her evil husband was president for eight years and we all survived. Even if she were to get elected and re-elected, the nation would still survive.
She might even have to throw in some conservative programs to get re-elected.
We might even get gridlock if the house and/or senate stays Republican.
And if the current administration is spending money like Democrats and looking the other way on massive violation of the law, then I might prefer gridlock and having a few conservative bones thrown my way by Hildebeest rather than Bush merely nodding to the right.
Please see my response to MikeInIraq.
Because the ERA was so vague it could be interpreted in many more ways that was "intended" (or maybe many more ways AS intended!)
I know you didn't ask me but here it is anyway.
I will vote for any Republican before I would vote for Hillary and that includes McCain, whom I deeply dislike.
I cannot think of one single democrat I could vote for with the possible exception of Zell Miller and as far as I know he's not running for anything.
Okay, and what will our grand coalition be formed of? A bunch of RINO's that what. I prefer to stand on principle and demand that the people who are elected do the same. If not, then we are all a bunch of whores, plain and simple.
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