POLITICS
Tom Tancredo: Did This Man
Doom The Republican Party?
By Stump Connolly
If the Republicans fall short in the presidential election this fall, they need only look back to Iowa to see where things went wrong.
The fault won’t lie with any of the candidates who presented their credentials to the Iowa Republican caucuses, but the one who didn’t – Colorado Rep. Tom Tancredo.
Tancredo was, on the day he announced his candidacy and the day he gave it up, a tangential player in the Republican sweepstakes. But he has had a lasting effect on the race. In of all places Iowa, he turned the candidate debates into referendums on illegal immigration –– and forced Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani and Mike Huckabee, the frontrunners in the race, into a dogfight over who agreed with him more.
“The emergence of Tancredoism as an ideological touchstone for two Republican front-runners is a stunning development,” Ryan Lizza wrote in The New Yorker, “another indication of the party’s rejection of nearly everything associated with the approach taken by George W. Bush.”
With all the challenges facing America in Iraq, Pakistan and at home, Tancredo hijacked the debates with his anti-immigration rhetoric and pulled all the other candidates – with the notable exception of John McCain – into a hard line stance against the “hordes of aliens” crossing the Mexican border to undermine our American way of life.
So who is this champion of American values? He is a five-term congressman from Colorado, named by Rolling Stone magazine in 2006 as one of the 10 worst. To show his resolve for protecting America, he joined the gun-toting Minutemen private militias patrolling the Mexican border (although he never reported how many stray heifers he managed to bag) and has made deporting 12 million Mexicans who have managed to sneak into America since 1988 a key plank in his platform.
He rallies support for his position by playing on Americans’ fear of another Al Qaeda attack, once threatening to bomb Mecca if it occurs, and urges us to look at our lawn workers, migrant laborers and neighbors as instruments of their terror. This despite the fact he himself is the grandson of Italian immigrants who in 1924 were so threatening to the American way of life that Congress closed the door on them (and shuttered Ellis Island.)
Tancredo proudly claims his relatives entered the country legally with a desire to assimilate into the American culture. The new immigrants, by contrast, sneak across our borders, live in enclave neighborhoods in "sanctuary cities" (one in Chicago abuts what is still called 80 years later "Little Italy",) send their children to our schools, then demand they be taught in Spanish, he claims. It’s the kind of broad brush argument you hear often on talk radio, a few factoids spun into resentment that “multi-culturalism” is ruining the country, that prompted the conservative National Review to conclude, “Tancredo is an idiot.”
It takes a lot of chutzpah to run your whole presidential campaign on a single issue you label "Save America." But Tancredo has chutzpah to spare. He first ran for office in 1998 as the champion of term limits for congressmen. In 2001, he told the Rocky Mountain News “I made a pledge, I took the pledge, I will live up to the pledge.” But in 2004, when the three-term limit he promised to uphold came to fruition, he reluctantly decided he’d risen to such prominence in Congress he would betray his constituents by not serving again.
Tom Tancredo is all bluster and not much else. He’s a hawk on Iraq (even though he ducked out of the Vietnam War on a medical deferment for “mental health” reasons) yet has no problem calling John McCain, a Navy pilot who suffered five years in a North Vietnamese prison camp after being shot down in that war, unpatriotic for his efforts to find a compromise on the immigration issue.
His single-minded dedication to denying foreign born immigrants a chance to share America’s promise as the land of opportunity not only goes against the grain of Christian values (as Huckabee pointed out), but it’s politically stupid.
Karl Rove, the now-retired mastermind behind President Bush’s two electoral victories, spent eight years carefully crafting a “family values” platform for Republicans that appealed not only to white evangelical Republicans but Mexican and Cuban voters, many Catholic, many recent citizens, who believed in the American dream.
From Bob Dole’s anemic 20 percent of the Hispanic vote in 1996, Rove raised President Bush’s support eight years later to 40 percent. In 2004, this effort gave Bush a solid margin of victory in Florida and enough votes in New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona and Colorado to get re-elected.
In one fell swoop, Tancredo has alienated this constituency by implying they are themselves aliens. And he has convinced many Republicans that this is the way to victory in 2008. He is wrong. He is terribly wrong.
I am not a big fan of New York Times editorials. Frankly, I hardly read them. But they published one last Sunday that touched on all the major points in this debate (so let me quote it):
Even by the low standards of presidential campaigns, the issue of immigration has been badly served in the 2008 race. Candidates – and by this we mean the Republicans, mostly – have been striking poses and offering prescriptions that sound tough but will solve nothing . . . .
Before voters pick a candidate and a president, they should insist on serious answers to questions like these:
What should be the role of immigrant labor in our economy? How does the country maximize its benefits and lessen its ill effects? Once the border is fortified, what happens to the 12 million illegal immigrants already here? Should they be expelled or allowed to assimilate? How? What about the companies that hire them?
The problem is that the country cannot build a fence or send troops and expect its problems to go away. Huge numbers of illegal immigrants never go anywhere near the border; about 40 percent enter legally and overstay their visas. Nor can the government purge workplaces of illegal workers without doing vast damage to the economy. At some point it must address the 12 million undocumented, who cannot be deported en masse.
One of the strong arguments for passing immigration reform last summer was that it was a last chance. If Congress did not seize it, the presidential race would blot out hopes of reform for two years or more.
Congress did not seize it, and all the problems are still there. The issue has left the country divided, fretful and ambivalent, and the voters are yearning for honesty and thoughtfulness.
Immigration reform has a place at the table of issues worthy of discussion in this race (somewhere below social security and above revamping FEMA, to my mind.) But Tancredo didn’t lead that discussion. He pre-empted it with his demagoguery. Seal the border, send ‘em back, no amnesty, no compromise. That was his position. Instead of challenging it, Romney, Guiliani, Fred Thompson, Ron Paul and, eventually, Huckabee stood up and saluted.
Sealing the borders is hardly the tent pole for a national campaign on where America must go next. Even Tancredo knew that when he dropped out. But the burden of Tancredo’s position now hangs around the neck of all the leading candidates, especially Mitt Romney, who got Tancredo’s endorsement on his way out.
Surely Romney, as a business consultant, sees the folly of accepting Tancredo’s one-dimensional approach to immigration. Or does he? Then again, maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe this is another of those heartfelt positions Romney takes now, knowing his heart can change course on a moment’s notice.
