Tancredo’s—and our—disappointment

Representative Tom Tancredo in an interview in the Washington Times speaks candidly of his disappointment in the ultimate effects of his presidential campaign on the immigration issue—or rather on the illegal immigration issue, since that seemed to be the only aspect of immigration he talked about in his campaign. On the second page of the article he says something very revealing:

He was in his hotel room at 11 p.m. on Dec. 20 when he saw former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a one-time advocate of giving sanctuary to illegals and the last of the candidates to adopt a border-security-first approach to the issue, promise in a spot commercial to secure the border and build a fence.

Mr. Tancredo immediately phoned campaign manager Bay Buchanan and said, “You can pull the plug on my campaign. The last domino just fell. Everybody’s come the distance.”

Since then, however, it is not clear whether the impact of Mr. Tancredo’s 11-month presidential nomination campaign has left him as an immigration hero or zero.

“The issue has been elevated to a place it hadn’t been before, but I will also be the first to admit, it has now begun to fall,” he said. “I’m sorry if that’s the result of my getting out of the race.”

“I don’t know that I have that much power over the issue,” Mr. Tancredo said. “I don’t know whether, if I had stayed in the race, it would still be up there at one or two, which is where it was. Now it’s down to three or four. I just don’t know.”

Notwithstanding my high regard for Tancredo, I’m disappointed in him here, on two counts. First, obviously he dropped out too quickly. He needed to stay and fight and push his issue, as the only candidate who felt it in his heart and understood it with his mind and could argue for it with sincerity and conviction. “No one else could play that tune,” sings Bob Dylan, “You knew it was up to me.” Second, I find it incomprehensible that Tancredo made only illegal immigration his theme, not immigration overall. This 2008 presidential campaign was the climax of Tancredo’s admirable political career, it was his chance to move the country on the national and cultural issues dearest to him, particularly on the need to do something about the mass legal immigration that is rapidly changing America into a non-Western country and destroying our historic culture and identity. To limit his campaign to the urgently important but hardly cutting-edge issue of illegal immigration was not only to miss that larger picture, it was to put himself in the silly position where some meaningless pro-forma statement by Giuliani (Giuliani!) about “securing the border and building a fence”—which was not even a sufficient policy on illegal immigration—would be enough to convince Tancredo that he had accomplished everything he could accomplish in this race and that it was time for him to drop out.

He tells the Globe:

Frankly, I don’t see myself as this great leader, as capable as Ronald Reagan. I know I’m not. So I can’t ask people to see something in me that I don’t see in myself.

Modesty—a quality as rare in politics as honesty—has always been one of Tancredo’s endearing traits. But in this campaign he took modesty too far. Instead of enlarging his political vision for the country, he shrank it down to the no-brainer of illegal immigration, and this was most regrettable.

* * *

A friend after reading the original draft of this entry said to me that for Tancredo to have advocated a major reduction in legal immigration would have turned off mainstream radio hosts who otherwise were very receptive to his message on illegal immigration and would have hurt his campaign. I replied with some emotion that in the introduction to The Path to National Suicide, published in 1990, I wrote that the debate on immigration was mindlessly frozen in illegal immigration and that it was vitally important to look at immigration as a whole. Have we really made no progress since 1990?, I asked. Is it still forbidden to go beyond the kindergarten level of the issue?

Also, running for president is the best opportunity a man will ever have to make a case for a new national vision to a broad public. To go through all the inconvenience and expense of a presidential campaign—a campaign, moreover, that is aimed at spreading ideas rather than at winning the White House—just to repeat the obvious to people who are mostly in agreement with you, is to waste a major opportunity.

- end of initial entry -

A. Zarkov writes:

I told Tancredo’s staff that he needed to be much more aggressive in the debates even to the point of being obnoxious. Instead he came across as a Casper Milquetoast, no passion, no capacity for leadership. He needed to go for broke by a forceful injection of the whole immigration issue into the debates and the campaign. Why didn’t he point out that pretty much all illegal aliens either engage in identity theft or tax fraud—both felonies? Why didn’t he point out the contradiction between immigration and carbon emission reduction? By choosing not to fight, he lost automatically. I think he was just to afraid to become a lighting rod for criticism. An aggressive stance would have brought down a firestorm of criticism and name calling—“racist,” “bigot,” xenophobe,” “nativist,” and so on. I guess he didn’t have the guts to deal with that level of animosity. This brings out the reason conservatives and Republicans keep losing—they don’t believe in anything strongly enough to take risks and fight.

Paul Nachman writes:

Tancredo clearly views all of mass immigration as problematic. See the quote at the upper right of this page.

I’m not surprised that he didn’t talk about legal immigration during his campaign—not that I noticed—as that’s a bridge that’s farther (and we hope not too far, ultimately). Enough people already dismissed him as a nut that talking about all of immigration probably would have been much harder. You need to bring people along. So many of them are at the “nation of immigrants” stage in their “thinking.”

Here is an interesting article from American Renaissance in 2004 that talks about Tancredo.

What the Non-Racial Right Thinks:
Patrick Buchanan’s American Cause conference.
by Jared Taylor

… Three-term congressman from Colorado Tom Tancredo was the keynote speaker. He is a very important figure who has almost single-handedly made a national political issue out of immigration, so it is worth examining his remarks in detail. He laughed at the Bush amnesty proposal, calling it “dead on arrival.” He said that in his five years in Congress he has never seen so vigorous a popular reaction against a proposal. All his Republican and even some Democratic colleagues say they are swamped with mail from outraged constituents. At Republican leadership retreats, he used to be the only congressman who would talk about immigration, but at the most recent retreat he said he didn’t have to say anything; 15 or 20 others were yelling about the amnesty.

He told about one Southern congressman who is a gynecologist and still has a practice. He got a big laugh when he imitated a thick Southern accent, and quoted his colleague: “I have done an informal poll of my patients and have found that amnesty is about as popular as genital herpes.”

Mr. Tancredo said he cannot understand how Mr. Bush thought his plan would win Hispanic votes. “The very next day, the Democrats did what they always do, they outbid us, and said we should give them instant green cards.” Mr. Tancredo believes immigration “is a dagger pointed at our hearts,” that the influx, both legal and illegal, combined with multiculturalism, threatens the identity of the country. He said instruction in school is anti-American, and that our children “should know a little more about Western Civilization than that Columbus came to America and destroyed paradise.” He called the Mexican government a “co-conspirator” in the threat to America, and talked about a Mexican official who explained to him that “it’s not two countries; it’s just a region.”

He said almost no one in Congress stands for anything except being reelected. When people accuse him of “having an agenda,” he says of course he has an agenda, and that no one should be in Congress who doesn’t have one. He said it has been “a wonderful experience” to be a politician with a real purpose, who works for what he truly believes is best for the country. He said he used to be sympathetic when colleagues told him they admired what he says but can’t do the same, but now he has no patience. “Either you care about your country or you don’t,” he says. Mr. Tancredo is all for putting soldiers on the border. He is thinking about running for the Senate, and says he will campaign for two things: a moratorium on all immigration, and no amnesty, ever. [my emphases]

The tenor of the immigration debate would change completely if there were just a few more members of Congress who took Mr. Tancredo’s positions and pushed them as hard as he does. He was an ebullient, effective speaker, and began and ended with a standing ovation. He is also quite approachable. He spent 20 minutes after his talk, chatting and laughing with admirers, and gives an impression of sincere bonhomie. He had used Samuel Huntington’s expression “clash of civilizations” in his talk, so I asked if he meant there was a civilizational clash between Mexico and the United States. He gave me a quizzical look and said no. The clash of civilizations was between Islam and the West, but if America is disunited because of ethnic identification it will not be able to respond to the challenge. [my emphasis—as always, he understands!]

Jason writes (June 4):

I just wanted to comment on the Tancredo string a bit as well as on the total failure of leadership here in my state.

As someone who was very involved with the Tancredo campaign. One must remember one of the things we lacked. Money! We did the best we could with what we had. Plus one must also remember that the Republican establishment so called was obsessed with the two RINOS (McCain and Giuliani) the wannabe (Romney who pretended to be conservative) and the man who pretended he was a candidate (Thompson). We were basically told to go away on most occasions, as was the Duncan Hunter campaign by the way.

The conservative talking heads gave us no attention no matter how many times we asked. And the debates were a joke, during one debate that was 90 minutes long Congressman Tancredo was not allowed to speak until almost 40 minutes into it. He even commented one might recall about how did they even notice he was there. And during the World Net Daily value voters debate, where he did great, the rest of the so called front runners did not even bother to show up.

This is kind of a good segway into New Jersey politics. We did multiple stupid things last night. First in the Senate, we re nominated for a second time an already two time loser in Dick Zimmer. This race is for the sacrificial lamb to Lautenberg, but at least lets not have someone we already know cannot win. But our state leadership made him their fourth choice, telling conservatives to stick it.

Then in the 7th congressional district we nominated another failure. Leonard Lance as Senate Minority Leader in the State Senate was demoted this year because his tenure in the leadership was abysmal. Now we promote him even higher to run for Congress!? If you do not want the conservative fine, but why does the state party keep giving us retreads we already know are failures.

Then there is Frank Lautenberg himself, during his acceptance speech during one of his more awake moments he talked about how proud he was that he had stopped oil drilling off the coast of the New Jersey. Basically he admitted that the current gas problem is his fault, and the people applauded.

One thing I learned, finally, last night is that the Republican party is basically telling me to go away, and I think I am finally ready to oblige.

Thank you as always sir, one of the last places of sanity left is this site, keep up the great work.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 02, 2008 12:19 AM | Send