Among the political battle scars American Constitution Party gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo likes to tout is a famous 2002 shouting match with Karl Rove, one of the most powerful men in George W. Bush’s Washington.
Then a Republican congressman, Tancredo had publicly called Bush out over America’s leaky border and the president’s support for legalizing millions of immigrants, leading Rove to banish him from the White House as a “traitor” to the Republican Party.
By the time Tancredo had finished out his congressional career six years later, the Republican Party had come to him. The kind of amnesty that he had accused Bush of supporting was a dirty word among GOP leaders, and immigration had moved from a third-tier issue to a central GOP concern.
“The president has done more for my name ID than I could have done in a lifetime,” Tancredo once boasted of Bush’s ire.
Like his skirmish with a powerful president, Tancredo’s entry in the governor’s race in July as a candidate for a tiny third party carries the hallmarks that have defined his career: spoiling for a fight; a willingness to push the edge of conventional political wisdom; and an outright confrontation with the party he served in for almost 30 years.
Reading the political moment
And as Republican primary winner Dan Maes continues to slide in the polls, it may also mark at least one other — a consistent ability to read the political moment better than the GOP establishment with which he has so often tussled.
“He’s got a great gut. He understands people. He doesn’t need the poll. He knows how to rally people and get them to respond to the message,” said Bay Buchanan, Tancredo’s longtime political collaborator and the sister of conservative commentator Pat Buchanan.
If there is single trait that most defines the man who served 10 years in Congress, briefly ran for president in 2007 and made a career of slamming the country’s broken immigration policies, it’s a relish for scorched-earth politics.
The 64-year-old Denver native recently called for the impeachment of President Barack Obama and suggested he would respond to Islamic terrorist attacks on U.S. soil by bombing Mecca, the Muslim world’s most holy site.
In a speech this year before a Tea Party convention in Nashville, Tenn., Tancredo said Obama was elected by “people who could not even spell the word ‘vote’ or say it in English.” He claimed the only reason the Democrat was in the White House is because America didn’t have a literacy test for voters.
As a congressman representing a conservative crescent of metro Denver’s southern suburbs until 2008, Tancredo leveraged a fiery critique of illegal immigration into a national, if narrow, constituency.
But his presidential run ended in December 2007, before a single primary vote was cast. And some Republican critics question whether a lightning-rod political career mostly focused on a single issue gives him the policy credentials to run the state.
“He can hold a heck of a press conference,” said Floyd Ciruli, a Denver-based pollster, “but he doesn’t look like the guy who suits up every day and is going to administer state government.”
As he glad-hands voters at diners and fundraisers across the state, Tancredo faces the task of transforming himself from a movement politician to a candidate voters believe can handle Colorado’s dire budget outlook and sagging economy.
At Mickey’s Top Sirloin in Denver last week, Doug Hamilton handed Tancredo a check but added that he offered the candidate some advice in a letter when Tancredo decided to enter the race.
“Make sure you campaign as governor, not as a proponent of an illegal immigration fix,” Hamilton, who owns the Family Shooting Center in Aurora, wrote to the candidate. “You don’t need to hit on that again.”
Tancredo said he has gotten the message.
The candidate still taps the theme of illegal immigration on a regular basis. He uses it as a major attack against Democratic candidate John Hickenlooper, the mayor of what Tancredo calls a “sanctuary city.” And he recently held a fundraiser with Joe Arpaio, the controversial sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz.
Fixing states’ broken schools
But Tancredo also said that fixing Colorado’s broken schools is at least as important to him as fixing the country’s broken immigration system.
“There’s almost an equal division in my mind between education reform and immigration reform,” he said.
“I recognize that my strong suit is not compromise,” he said. “But I also believe that these times demand leadership.”
Yet Tancredo’s rhetoric always tends to the sweep of some epic battle, and his candidacy for governor is no different.
If elected, Tancredo, said he will join with Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona and “a couple of others in trying to push for what I call a 10th Amendment revolution” — a focus on curbing the power of the federal government and on strengthening states’ rights.
Fans point out that Tancredo’s penchant for high-octane rhetoric sometimes obscures the substance of a long career.
A former high school history teacher, Tancredo was an early advocate of school vouchers, winning a seat in the state House of Representatives in 1976 on a pledge to push alternatives to public schools.
He was appointed by President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to head the regional office of the federal Department of Education, and he spent much of the next 11 years dismantling it — slashing the number of employees from 222 down to 60.
“When I first got the call, I said, ‘Please know that I’m flattered, but I don’t think we should have a U.S. Department of Education,’ ” Tancredo said of the appointment. “The guy said, ‘That’s why we’re calling you.’ “
In five terms in Congress, Tancredo repeatedly introduced his signature Mass Immigration Reduction Act, which would have placed a moratorium on most legal immigration to the United States. It never gained significant support among his colleagues.
But a willingness to say what other politicians wouldn’t on the issue made him a star of a burgeoning anti-immigration movement outside Washington — and occasionally vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy.
In 2002, The Denver Post reported that an extensive renovation of the basement of Tancredo’s Littleton home was done by workers who included several here in the country illegally. Tancredo maintained he hired a contracting company to do the work — and that it wasn’t his responsibility to check their status.
But Tancredo said his greatest accomplishment in Congress had nothing to do with immigration. In 2002, he sponsored the Sudan Peace Act, which was signed by Bush the same year and aimed at facilitating a solution to that country’s deadly civil war. Tancredo, who had become interested in the issue through his church, said the bill was significant “because it actually saved a whole bunch of lives, as opposed to anything else I could really do.”
Tancredo’s decision to leave the Republican Party in order to run as an American Constitution candidate has brought a career-defining battle with his former party’s establishment full circle.
Not feeling connected to GOP
Asked whether he still considers himself in some part a Republican, Tancredo paused a moment before answering.
“For the last 10 or 15 years,” he said, “I’ve never really had a relationship with the party that made me warm to it, feel like I did during the Reagan administration.
“No, I don’t necessarily feel connected (to the party) anymore.”
But the state’s Republican leaders — as well as the party’s voters — now find themselves in a sticky situation.
They give Tancredo credit for putting together an impressive campaign in a few short weeks, far outstripping in terms of both fundraising and organizational focus their own primary winner, Maes.
Kent Lambert, a state representative from Colorado Springs, was one of only three state legislators to endorse Maes, but last week he switched his endorsement to Tancredo.
Lambert called the governor’s race “a very, very unusual event” and one that justified unusual tactics.
“We do have a moral dilemma. I really, really want to support the Republican candidate,” Lambert said. “(But) it’s a question of competency. In a very short period of time, Tom Tancredo has put together a very effective campaign. If Dan Maes decides to get out — or even if he doesn’t — his campaign is basically over at this point.”
As it has many times during his career, the Republican Party appears to be coming to Tom Tancredo, rather than the other way around.
“Tancredo,” Lambert said, “is the only place Republicans can go to defeat the Democrat.”
Michael Riley: 202-662-8907 or mriley@denverpost.com
Staff writer Jessica Fender contributed to this report.
Editor’s note
For three days, The Denver Post is exploring the personalities of Colorado’s top gubernatorial candidates through their political and professional careers.
