A star shines on Tancredo
The editorial board of The Wall Street Journal has argued that what fallen Trump adviser Stephen Bannon really wants is to make sure Democrats retake Washington.
Easier to keep up a perpetual war that way. Easier to make bank.
Here in Colorado, the suggestion should resonate, as Bannon recently visited to do what he can here to help the Democrats along. One of the Breitbart executive chairman’s moves was to seek to marry his eternal war with Tom Tancredo’s, the former congressman and active immigration hardliner who anticipated Donald Trump in his dramatically unsuccessful bid for the GOP presidential nomination in 2008.
I argued recently that the impulse to keep up the eternal Tea Party war as a lucrative fundraising tool explained Tancredo’s last two gubernatorial runs, and the one he’s thinking about launching now.
(Quick refresher: The Tanc grew upset with Colorado’s elected Republican leadership for not supporting the torch-carrying white supremacists who rampaged in
Charlottesville, Va.)
Clearly, there is a solid minority bloc willing to support a nocompromises fight they hope will prove to be a winning hand.
But the useful energy the Tea Party brought to the then moribund Republican Party in the early years of the Obama presidency has morphed into something too hostile and alien to gain lasting traction in this wildly diverse country.
The observation explains, of course, several years of gridlock and the recent hugely embarrassing GOP effort to fix Obamacare.
Really, how are we supposed to think of Bannon now? And just what is it his supporters are supposed to think it is they are doing?
Bannon backed Trump. Trump sent Bannon packing. Bannon’s now set on undoing Trump, as he showed by backing arch-conservative Roy Moore over Trump’s Senate preference in Alabama. Yet many if not most hardcore Trump supporters thrill at Bannon’s campaign.
How does one grasp such fever logic? Isn’t the most likely explanation that the only real goal of such a mindset is simply to complain and cause trouble?
The Bannon-tancredo path might be a rollicking, cathartic way to vent frustration, but history already has shown that it leads only to frustration.
Colorado’s Republicans saw through Candidate Trump and famously didn’t back him. Not a single delegate supported him at the state convention. Sen. Cory Gardner called Trump a buffoon, and announced he wouldn’t vote for him. Rep. Mike Coffman based part of his re-election strategy on resisting Trump.
Swing-state Colorado voters handed Hillary Clinton a hefty win on Election Day.
Who else will Bannon recruit? If we look to Moore for guidance, maybe he’ll see a rising star in one-term state Rep. Gordon Klingenschmidt, a televangelist who said, among other things, that God used the insane acts of a woman who attacked a would-be mother in Longmont and cut her fetus from her womb as divine punishment for the sins of abortionists.
Yes, progressives have hardliner figures. Too many of them. Yes, extremist politics on both sides of the aisle is addictive big-money entertainment and dangerously like absolutist religion for too many.
I hoped it would stop with the advent of a President Trump. I hoped that Mark Cuban was right, and that the charlatan functions as chemotherapy to rid the host of its life-threatening disease by laying bare the rottenness of our current politics.
So when do we wake up and see the sunshine and return to the hard work of governing for all?
Whatever happened to Americans basically getting along? Why are so many happy to support bomb throwers and hacks who can only see things their way?
Plenty of more mainstream Republicans have good ideas from which the country would benefit, if only they weren’t fighting off hardliner primary challenges. I know this firsthand because I consult with and enjoy, befriend and learn from so many wonderful human beings in the Grand Old Party.
It’s time to say no to the crazies. We have a nation filled with good, caring, hardworking people who deserve so much better than this.
Coloradans should see any Bannon-tancredo coalition for what it amounts to: a cynical way to keep the donations coming in and stoke division with little chance of electoral success.