The Tea Party Convention that kicked offThursday at a Nashville hotel had, even before it began, been the subject of quite a bit of controversy. The opening speaker at the convention, former Rep. Tom Tancredo, R-Colo., did nothing to diminish that.
Tancredo — best known for his vehement opposition to illegal immigration, if not immigration an immigrants generally — stuck to the subject he really knows. Or at least thinks he knows.
The former congressman complained that “people who could not even spell the word ‘vote’, or say it in English, put a committed socialist ideologue in the White House. His name is Barack Hussein Obama.” And he said the reason for this was that “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.” (There’s a reason for that, by the way.)
Tancredo also had a few things to say about a fellow Republican — albeit one who doesn’t share his views on immigration — Sen. John McCain.
“Thank God John McCain lost the election,” Tancredo said. This argument wasn’t about the ideological differences between the two men, though; it was about Obama’s election having spurred the Tea Party movement and the right generally. For example, he said, if McCain had won, “Sarah Palin would not be free to tell it like it is.”
One spokesman for the Tea Party Nation, which organized the convention, told CNN he’d had some issues with Tancredo’s speech. “It doesn’t further the dialogue,” he said.
Repbublican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes listens during a debate with his opponents at a television station in Denver, on Thursday, Sept. 2, 2010. Dan Maes rejected calls Thursday that he leave the race after key backers pulled their support for him and others expressed skepticism about his murky past in law enforcement.(AP Photo/Ed Andrieski) (Credit: AP)
The Colorado Republican party failed in their effort to get gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes to withdraw from the race. Even in a cycle in which extreme views, conspiracy theories, Bircher tendencies, and general stupidity are all fast becoming normalized by a radical crop of depressingly viable insurgent Republican candidates, Maes is just too inescapably awful for Colorado voters. Plus, the true believers can just vote for immigrant-hater Tom Tancredo, currently mounting a third-party campaign. But how bad is it for Maes?
Maes is polling below 10% in two recent polls. Tancredo is at around 40%, and Democrat John Hickenlooper has a modest lead. Dick Cheney, the most hated Vice President in modern history, never polled below 19%. For any major-party politician to fall below 20% takes, like, extreme sexual deviancy. Or murder. (And oftentimes those won’t even do it.)
As the AP reported last week, if Maes actually does worse than 10% on election day, the GOP will lose its majority party status in Colorado for four years. Which would be funny, but that would also mean that the GOP would be replaced, in Colorado, by the American Constitution Party, which is, honestly, a step in an even crazier direction. (Especially if that monster Tancredo actually pulls out a victory.)
Repbublican gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes listens during a debate with his opponents at a television station in Denver, on Thursday, Sept. 2, 2010. Dan Maes rejected calls Thursday that he leave the race after key backers pulled their support for him and others expressed skepticism about his murky past in law enforcement.(AP Photo/Ed Andrieski) (Credit: AP)
Republican candidate for Colorado governor and UN bike-share mind-control plot uncoverer Dan Maes is merrily charging ahead with his campaign over the objections of nearly every Republican official in the state. The way Maes tells it, the fact that the party is begging him to drop out is just one more reason he needs to keep running. And he has a message for the federal government, too. That message is: “screw them.”
With that statement, Maes was promising to enforce some draconian anti-undocumented immigrant law, even if Uncle Sam doesn’t like it. “We’re going to do what’s best for the people of Colorado,” he said — excepting, I guess, the non-citizen people of Colorado.
Maes told his audience that he keeps going to what he thinks are fundraisers, only to find himself being told by various congressmen and senators to quit the gubernatorial race (these are also called “interventions,” Dan). Longtime immigrant-hater Tom Tancredo is so fed up with Maes that he’s entered the race on the Constitution Party ticket. And Tancredo is now polling in second place, more or less guaranteeing that Democrat John Hickenlooper will be the next governor of Colorado.
The Colorado Independent called county GOP chairs, and a consensus seems to be forming that this whole Maes mess happened because the state party did everything in its power to avoid a contested primary involving more than one viable candidate — and then their preferred candidate crashed and burned.
Maes used to tell a great story about working “undercover” battling gambling and drugs — until he was dismissed from the police force because he “got too close to some significant people in the community who were involved in these activities.” This supposedly happened in a town improbably named Liberal, Kansas. Except that it didn’t ever happen, as he was eventually forced to admit that he made the story up.
The Republican gubernatorial candidate in Colorado rejected an offer on Wednesday from former GOP congressman Tom Tancredo for both men to get out of the race and let the party pick a new candidate.
State Republican Party chairman Dick Wadhams said he delivered the offer to Republican nominee Dan Maes after Tancredo offered it as a compromise to give Republicans a chance to win back the governor’s office in November. Tancredo bolted from the party last month to run as an American Constitution Party candidate.
“Tom Tancredo contacted me late Monday to indicate he would withdraw from the race for governor if Dan Maes did so as well,” Wadhams said. “I asked Tom for the opportunity to present this offer to Dan Maes, which I did do this morning. I felt it was my responsibility as state chairman to inform Dan of this offer since it held open the possibility of eliminating the current three-way race that gives the Democratic candidate a huge advantage.”
Maes beat challenger Scott McInnis in the GOP primary last Tuesday after both men rejected a demand from Tancredo that they get out of the race and let the party pick a new candidate if polls showed neither man could beat Hickenlooper after the primary.
Since then, Maes has been struggling to get support from national party leaders who doubt the party can win if Tancredo stays in the race.
Tancredo’s spokesman, Cliff Dodge, said Tancredo made the offer because he believes Maes has no chance of beating Democrat John Hickenlooper in November. He said the compromise included a stipulation that neither Republican be a candidate for a Republican vacancy committee.
“The answer was two letters: N-O,” Dodge said.
Maes spokesman Nate Strauch said if Tancredo wants to participate in the governor’s race, “he should go through the nominating process like everybody else.”
Wadhams said he respects the decisions of both candidates and said he will continue to back Maes.
Nativist loon Tom Tancredo will run for governor of Colorado, because for some reason the two Republicans currently running for that job displease him.
Well, Scott McInnis has a plagiarism problem, and Dan Maes had some campaign finance problems. Tancredo’s real problem is probably that he looked around one day, realized that any Republican with name recognition has a good shot at winning a race this year, and was dismayed to learn that it was too late for him to get on the Colorado Republican primary ballot.
Tancredo’s original gambit was to call on both Maes and McInnis to promise to drop out the race after the primary, so that the party could name someone else for the November ballot. (That someone else would presumably be Tancredo.) But McInnis and Maes wouldn’t go for that, surprisingly. So now Tancredo is a the Constitution Party’s candidate for governor.
Will the Tea Partiers — who are, after all, just independent, concerned citizens, and not simply angry White Republicans — vote for Tom Tancredo on a third party line? He does share their concern about the single biggest threat facing America today:
The greatest threat to the United States today, the greatest threat to our liberty, the greatest threat to the Constitution of the United States, the greatest threat to our way of life, everything we believe in, the greatest threat to the country that was put together by the Founding Fathers is the guy that is in the White House today.
Tancredo loves attention almost as much as he hates Mexicans and people he suspects of being Mexican, so the fact that he’s hurting the Colorado GOP is probably not keeping him up at night.
With Tancredo splitting the extremist vote and GOP Senate candidate Ken Buck’s live-mic problems, Colorado could be another state where Tea Party enthusiasm doesn’t translate to electoral success. But we’ll see! I might be eating those words when Governor Tancredo bans all public use of the Spanish language and declares himself Governor of “Red.”
Breaking news today: Somewhere in America, at this very moment, a right-wing favorite son is preparing to launch a primary campaign in a swing state against an establishment-anointed frontrunner of dubious conservative orthodoxy.
Someday, everyone’s going to get sick of writing this story. But not yet!
Joining the conservative revolutionary vanguard this week is former congressman and presidential candidate Tom Tancredo. Probably best known as the Republican Party’s foremost nativist, Tancredo confirmed Thursday that he is preparing to run for governor of Colorado in 2010. The ex-representative told a reporter that he “fully intends to run.”
Tancredo has entertained running for higher office a number of times in recent years, but the general consensus was that the guy is unelectable statewide in Democratic-trending Colorado. (So naturally, he ran for president instead.) He was planning to stay out of the current gubernatorial race, he says, because state Sen. Josh Penry was already in, providing the necessary conservative challenge to the leading Republican candidate, former Rep. Scott McInnis.
McInnis — much like former Tancredo presidential rival Mitt Romney — used to be pro-choice. McInnis explained in a recent debate, “You grow older and you have kids and grandkids and friends die and you realize how important life is.” As with Romney, that explanation isn’t cutting it for conservative activists, and doubts about McInnis’ credibility were the basis of Penry’s campaign. (One important factor here: Though the state may be going blue, areas of it are bases of the evangelical movement.)
But earlier this week, Penry dropped out of the race, saying he couldn’t raise enough money to win, and didn’t want to wound McInnis if he couldn’t beat him. This opened up a spot on the right for Tancredo, who describes himself as “not a part of the Republican establishment. My allegiance is more to a philosophy than it is to a party.” He added, “The Republican Party has lost its soul and it’s looking in all the wrong places to find it.”
This is the guy, of course, who suggested the United States should use the Muslim holy city of Mecca as a nuclear hostage against terrorist threats. He described Miami as looking like “a third-world country.” And he said that Justice Sonia Sotomayor is a “member of the Latino KKK,” and, because he appointed her, President Obama “may indeed be a racist.” Tancredo might be the closest thing to a Rep. Pat Buchanan there has ever been — but he’s running in an increasingly Latino state.
Meanwhile, once-popular Democratic Gov. Bill Ritter has been struggling in the polls. Ritter’s surely thrilled to hear that the GOP’s still set to have another intra-party ideological throwdown as it picks an opponent for him.
CPAC 2011 was a carnival of weirdness 
Glenn Beck Marries Glenn Beck 
A match made on Craigslist adult services 
Can’t see the forest for the wood 
The things I carry 
When I lost the ability to type 
Pop art, the beaded edition 
The beautiful banality of high school 
The unemployed meet MacArthur’s tanks 
Demi’s last night out 
One day you’re in 
Pitch and catch 
