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Created: Tuesday, November 22, 2005, at 18:22:56 EDT
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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.
fair enough
My point is and was and always has been, you don't win the Presidency or even the nomination when you are in the House of Representatives. It just doesn't happen and Tancredo IS NOT the candidate to change that.
Absolutely. I want to hear Tancredo and his voice for this issue in the debates. First the two party cartel shut out ANY 3rd (actually 2nd) view on anything in the debates. Now they want to shut out members of their own party. Party of inclusion, my butt. No one else hand picked by the media and a select few is going to touch this issue. It's past time it was addressed in a campaign year. Of course that's exactly what the 10%'ers want: the other 90% silenced.
No, you sure can't. Perfect.
BTTT!
Mr. Tancredo also has a spine, unlike most of the current crop of Pubbies in Congress.
I advise you save your money. Consider the aformentioned posters as comic relief only who pop up like clockwork on immigration threads to say something hysterically nonsensical, kinda like FR's version of Crazy Guggenhiem, Raymond J Johnson Jr or Kramer.
Their utter predictability is what makes them hilarious. Boo - its Bay Buchanan! OMG Tancredo stabbed Tom Delay in the back! You couldn't write funnier stuff.
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Created: Tuesday, November 22, 2005, at 18:22:56 EDT
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You should know that I'm on the good guy's side at all times. Conservative, historically respectful, Constitutional on it's facial/initial meanings. Turbulent interpretations of the Constitution driven by socialist judges during the past seventy years need to be thrown out on that basis alone. The 14th Amendment was for insuring that former slaves were assured the right to vote, NOT the interpretation that children of illegals were automatic citizens. Those children are sovereign to the countries their parents came from - we need a major lawsuit brought up to define that.
Those illegals who've served valiantly in our military should be honored and recognized for their service, yet should not be a conduit for seemingly endless family members trying to slide in. Ted Kennedy has done far more than enough damage with his "Immigration Lottery" which has enabled legions of near-savages from traditionally America-hating countries to come here on a free pass while thousands of talented and educated people from developed countries wishing to come here are denied.
Can we agree that the Immigration Lottery and it's backward policies should be overturned for the far more sensible policy of allowing the best and the brightest to take root here?
Just like taking the black out of the ghetto, you take the hispanic out of the barrio and he stops voting 2/6s Democrat.
Bush got half their vote last time. Progress can be made.
Thank you very much for the sagacious advice. I know fully well that it would be throwing good money away for nothing. I'm just sick of this person's constant Tokya Rose noise and want to have a showdown. If she's smarter or is more knowledgable than me so be it...but I feel certain that this individual is a tool for the Open Borders Lobby and doesn't have a real leg to stand on. If that's the case she needs to be outed for what she is. I am who I am all day long every day.
If all the 'true' conservatives left the Republican party and started their own party, what would be the outcome of elections in the United Kingdom?
Well, the Conservative party and the moderate Republicans would probably form a coalition government because they got a combined 55% of the vote. Hooray!
Ok, now what if the same thing happened in the United STates?
Very different outcome - in fact, we saw the outcome in 1992. A minority Liberal with 42-3% of the vote would win.
A smarter move is to form a coalition/caucus WITHIN one of the two parties, then get your guy through the primary. Lets try another scenario.
If the goal is to elect a true libertarian Constitutionalist conservative, what scenario do you think would be most useful to him:
a) All the conservatives in the country are organized into a caucus within the Republican Party where they make 40% of the party and can get another 11% by arm twisting, reaching out, etc.
b) Half the conservatives left to start their own party and have abandoned the R party to the moderates who won't give him a nomination. He goes into the general primary ala Perot or Buchanan and, again, nearly tips the election to John Kerry.
See, this isn't about ideology or comprimosing principles or about personalities or people. It's about whether or not you are a G D retard and can't do match.
On a completely different note, I strongly suspect that reason doesn't really count for much with the true third party types who read everything I wrote as 'RINO talk'. As these types normally exhibit poor personal hygiene, don't contribute financially or otherwise, and spend most of their days talking on HAM radio and posting on FR, saved the trouble of getting up from their chairs throughout the day by using empty milk jugs, I don't think they really account for much.
The overwhelming majority of us real conservatives 'get it'.
You just did the same thing. What does that make you?
Clinton and Bush got elected with a lot more "baggage" than Tancredo has.
I guess the nurse must be a little late with the meds. Hang in there, dude, I'm sure she'll be around to your room soon.
Well, we still have a military and we don't have a national healthcare system.
Oh, and we aren't part of the Kyoto Protocols.
Oh, and there's the Cheif Justice of the Supreme Court.
Oh, and don't forget the tax cuts.
Oops, and the partial birth abortion ban.
...maybe they are getting some things done, even if they do let the hippies punch way to far above their weight class.
It does, but we need to work smarter, not harder. :)
Very good.
Perot had a deal precut to handle all the database info for Hitleries Health Care, ah la E-Systems. He never intended to win anything. His numbers went up, he droped out. His numbers went too far down, he's back in. Just enough to spoil the vote.
This is not the case with the constitution Party.
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