The Tom Tancredo Road Show
Following politics, you learn to keep up with the calendar’s deadlines for campaign finance filings, dates for caucuses, assemblies, primaries and the like.you also learn about the unofficial calendar. In Colorado, one of the biggest election cycle events of the past decade has been the Tom Tancredo Road Show.
It’s fabulous political theater, performed by a consummate performance artist who for decades has made his money attacking illegal immigration, stoking hatred toward Muslims, trying to end or curtail abortion rights and generally pushing Republicans to the dark side.
The road show features motorcycles, leather jackets, beer bashes and cookouts draped in American flags, and lots of rhetorical grenades and flame-throwing.
Tancredo’s bare-knuckles messaging connects like a jab to the nose and a hook to the jaw.
Typically, the tour starts later than you’d expect for a candidate interested in winning, and there’s a lesson there we’ll take up. This cycle it’s starting early.
Tancredo told Denver Post reporter John Frank late last month that, while he left the GOP for a second time in 2015, he’s now thinking about re-registering and hopping into the Republican primary race for governor. His reason for chewing it over explains much about the focus of the regular tour.
The Tanc believes that — post Charlottesville, Va. — the GOP should stand by the claim that those ideologically incomprehensible antifascists are just as bad as the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-nazis and the rest of the so-called white supremacists who ended up killing a young woman, injuring many others and attempting to lay waste to the idea that tolerant multiculturalism is a reasonable goal.
His Trump-like equivalency on the subject isn’t armchair quarterbacking, either. Stoking his ire is the fact that, after Charlottesville, the Cheyenne Mountain Resort in Colorado Springs canceled a conference reservation for the white nationalist organization VDARE Foundation. Tancredo was to speak.
A VDARE writer was among the Charlottesville demonstration organizers.
Tancredo is upset that no Colorado Republican “elected or running for office, has the guts to say, ‘What the hell is going on?’ ”
More recently, Tancredo told KNUS talk show host Dan Caplis he hoped U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, R-aurora, would be defeated in his 2018 re-election bid. Coffman’s great sin is rightly criticizing President Donald Trump and working to enshrine into law provisions that would protect children brought to the country illegally from being deported back to lands they’ve never known.
Beyond most of his political views, which I find abhorrent, I admire Tancredo’s natural talents and refined skills at what he does. I’ve written positively about him in the past.
He’s got Christmas-tree charisma. He means to perform the important role of watchdog over what he believes should be his party’s bedrock principles.
Except that Tancredo is like the cherubic kid at the birthday party who ruins it all by throwing rocks at the hosts’ dogs and peeing in the punch. As a state legislator and U.S. congressman, as well as a member of the Reagan administration, Tancredo was mostly serious about the work.
But the question over the last several years has been and remains whether Tancredo is truly seeking office or simply trying to keep the donations pouring in.
(You’ve got to admit, he’s got a great gig. It’s far easier being a Sarah Palin on a bus than a Bill Owens running the state.)
The question with launching another Tancredo Road Show now is whether another tour ruins any chance of serious consideration of conservative candidates.
After months of Trump Land, with growing fears of class warfare, with too many Democrats rushing to follow the nutcase lead of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Colorado voters deserve a legitimate Republican gubernatorial contender.
Another Tancredo Road Show would almost certainly spoil the opportunity.