Tancredo is Out; Endorses Romney
[Guest post by DRJ]
Tom Tancredo dropped out of the GOP Presidential race and endorsed Mitt Romney:
“Rep. Tom Tancredo abandoned his long-shot bid for the Republican presidential nomination Thursday and endorsed Mitt Romney’s candidacy, saying the Massachusetts Republican “can go the distance.”
Rep. Tom Tancredo announces he is ending his presidential campaign Thursday.
Tancredo, a Colorado Republican, is a fierce proponent of stricter illegal immigration laws, but his campaign struggled to gain traction with Republican primary voters, despite many naming illegal immigration as a top concern.
Noting the “incredibly long odds” when he launched his White House bid, Tancredo said his campaign achieved what it meant to do: put illegal immigration on the national agenda.
“I am ecstatic about the fact that we can say we have made remarkable progress along those lines,” Tancredo said during a press conference in Des Moines, Iowa. “According to Newsweek, the Tancredo campaign has already won.”
After announcing he was dropping out of the race, Tancredo endorsed Romney’s presidential bid, saying that Romney supported his stance on illegal immigration and national security and that the former Massachusetts governor could win the presidency.”
Marc Ambinder says Tancredo’s manager Bay Buchanan was pushing Romney as a way to counteract Huckabee:
“Will he endorse? Unclear. If he does, the betting is on Thompson or Romney, although advisers to both men expect the other to get it, if it’s gettable. Note that Bay Buchanan is a member of the LDS church and is said to be pushing Tancredo to endorse Romney as a way of repudiating Huckabee, somehow. We’ll see.”
Tancredo has been known for his resolute stance on immigration. Mitt Romney does not seem like the best representative for that view. I hope Tancredo endorsed Romney on principle and not out of political gamesmanship. To do otherwise would be a sad conclusion for someone known for his principles more than his politics.
H/T allan.
— DRJ
Bay Buchanan, Pat Buchanan’s sister, is a Mormon? I thought she was Catholic. Interesting.
Well, Tancredo has endorsed Romney. I don’t know why you would wonder, Romney is the only other candidate I know who has been at the border and spending time with the border patrol and really talking about illegal immigration and what to do to counteract it.
Sara (3337ed) — 12/20/2007 @ 1:55 pmSara,
Romney talks tough on immigration now. He was more open-minded about the Bush-McCain amnesty plan in 2005:
I understand people’s minds can change on issues. However, that’s a big change in a short amount of time and it’s not consistent with Tancredo’s views.
DRJ (09f144) — 12/20/2007 @ 2:03 pmI hope Tancredo endorsed Romney on principle and not out of political gamesmanship.
One doesn’t readily associate “principle” with Colorado’s main spokesperson for the cause of term limits – who repeatedly broke his “solemn” vow.
I think Tancredo actually hurt his cause more than helped it with short-sighted and mean-spirited stunts.
steve (9b3289) — 12/20/2007 @ 2:12 pmThey were “reasonable proposals.” I liked the President’s 5-point plan and understood that it was a 5-point plan and not a one point plan that included my way or the highway. I think the loss in 2006 should illustrate that America does not support the hardliner position of the Malkin wing.
And if you don’t know yet that Romney always studies an issue and gathers information before declaring his position, then you need to do more candidate research. Romney is a pragmatist who believes in securing the border with fence and many other measures, he is also a very strong supporter of employer sanctions and a workable system of verification that employers can use. The man is all about workable solutions that actually solve problems, not the knee jerk and rather childish attitude of throw them all on boxcars and deport with no explanation as to who would pay for such a program or manage it or make it work or where the thousands of guards and law enforcement would come from to put such a dumb plan into place. Or where to warehouse so much humanity while they are awaiting transport and/or processing.
Sara (3337ed) — 12/20/2007 @ 2:17 pmSteve,
Tancredo may or may not have taken inconsistent or hypocritical positions on other issues but he’s been consistent on immigration, even when it was unpopular to do so. Don’t you agree?
Sara,
I’m glad you are so committed to your candidate.
DRJ (09f144) — 12/20/2007 @ 2:17 pmI’ve posted this at more than just this blog, but I definitely do not work for Romney’s campaign. I want some conservatives, who I feel haven’t given Mitt a fair shake thus far, to seriously reconsider their positions. Romney is clearly now the anti-illegal immigration candidate. What candidate can win the support of ALL conservatives…fiscal, defense, AND social? Mitt’s the man!
Cory (863679) — 12/20/2007 @ 2:20 pmThe Romney Plan:
Secure The Border. Follow through on Congressional commitment to build a physical and technological fence along the southern border, and secure other points of entry.
Implement An Enforceable Employer Verification System. Issue a biometrically-enabled and tamperproof card to non-citizens and create a national database for non-citizens so employers can easily verify their legal status in this country.
Reject Amnesty. Do not give amnesty or any special pathway to those who have come to this country illegally.
Punish Sanctuary Cities. Cut back federal funding to cities that are “sanctuaries” for illegal immigrants and refuse to comply with federal law or aid federal law enforcement.
Improve Interior Enforcement. Provide resources to enforce immigration laws throughout the nation, and crackdown on employers who continue to hire illegals with stiffer fines and penalties.
Encourage Legal Immigration. Streamline the system to recruit and retain skilled workers and welcome the best and the brightest from around the world to our universities.
Sara (3337ed) — 12/20/2007 @ 2:23 pmSara and Cody,
What Romney says now is not what he said 2 years ago. He may be a true believer now but he doesn’t bring the same commitment to immigration issues that Tancredo has demonstrated. I am not saying Tancredo’s position was right and Romney is/was wrong, and I’m not saying Romney wouldn’t be a good President. But he is not Tancredo’s soul-mate or heir on immigration issues.
By the way, Sara, don’t all the GOP candidates currently support your Romney talking points on immigration?
DRJ (09f144) — 12/20/2007 @ 2:30 pmOh, this is bad.
And now just because it means I was wrong.
Wow. Trouble ahead for all of us.
Alan (f1706f) — 12/20/2007 @ 2:42 pmI don’t know if they all support the same plan. The one thing I do know is that Romney is the solutions-based candidate and if anyone can find the answer to this impossible problem, he can.
Also, what does what anyone said a few years ago have to do with today when the issues have taken on so many new meanings and outcomes. I’ve been angry for years at California’s open door policies and the fact that it is easier for illegals to get health services than it is for me, a broke uninsured senior citizen, too young to get Medicare, but with no employee health care since I stayed home for 5 years with the full time care of an ill parent to save the government money for her care. I also highly resent that nearly every available job requires you to be bilingual, Spanish/English. My 4 years of high school French and 3 years of college German don’t count here in So. Calif. Being able to read “Les Miserables” or “Mein Kampf” in their native language isn’t real big on any employer’s required list.
Sara (3337ed) — 12/20/2007 @ 2:43 pmAnd not* just because I was wrong.
Im’ stupid. I cain’t splel.
Alan (f1706f) — 12/20/2007 @ 2:44 pmSara,
If what candidates said or believed in the past doesn’t matter, then why not support Rudy? His immigration position matches up point-for-point with Mitt’s.
DRJ (09f144) — 12/20/2007 @ 2:54 pmI doubt Mitt’s people will permit Tancredo within 50 feet with cameras nearby.
steve (9b3289) — 12/20/2007 @ 3:00 pmImplement An Enforceable Employer Verification System. Issue a biometrically-enabled and tamperproof card to non-citizens and create a national database for non-citizens so employers can easily verify their legal status in this country.
Won’t then many illegals just claim to be US citizens? If a job applicant claims to be a US citizen I think it’s unlawful discrimnation for the employer to question that-even if the applicant speaks no English. Whatever happened to the proposal for a tamper-proof SSAN card?
sabanaoeste (004797) — 12/20/2007 @ 3:01 pmI don’t support Rudy because he is first and foremost a prosecutor and present blog owner excepted, I’m not real big on prosecutors, and he is way too much “me me me.” How he stands on the issues is not an issue for me with Rudy. I like Rudy, if he gets the nomination I’ll vote for him, but I’d much prefer to see him as Attorney General than President.
Sara (3337ed) — 12/20/2007 @ 3:02 pmSara: “Bay Buchanan, Pat Buchanan’s sister, is a Mormon? I thought she was Catholic.”
Bay Buchanan converted from Catholicism to the LDS Church in 1976. Other notable converts are Glenn Beck (Catholicism – 1999), Sen. Harry Reid (Never went to church – 1960) and Mitt Romney’s wife, Ann (Episcopalian – 1969).
JayHub (0a6237) — 12/20/2007 @ 3:21 pm#2 of the Romney Plan = an eventual “nationalIDCard”
#3 = something that could possibly be “interpreted”. After all, Bush is against “amnesty” too.
While Romney has apparently danced around something similar to Fred Thompson’s plan of causing many illegal aliens to go home, he hasn’t stressed it.
TLB (08032f) — 12/20/2007 @ 4:45 pmPolitical shifts…
Another Drew (8018ee) — 12/20/2007 @ 5:28 pmWhen someone shifts their political position towards a more “liberal” position, they are said to have “grown”;
Conversly, when they shift to a more “conservative” position, they are said to be pandering to their base.
I don’t understand it. It seems like he’s stabbing Hunter in the back.
One thing you gotta say about Romney though, he hasn’t shyed away from the controversial conservatives. He had Coulter introduce him at CPAC, Sheriff Joe introduced him in Arizona, and now he has actively persued an endorsemnt from Tom Tancredo. Plus, Limbaugh and Levin have implicitly endorsed him. Perhaps they know something positive about Romney that the public Romney isn’t letting on.
j curtis (8bcca6) — 12/20/2007 @ 6:20 pmTo do otherwise would be a sad conclusion for someone known for his principles more than his politics.
Ahh yes principles.
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/news/item.jsp?aid=79
“Dressed casually in a yellow t-shirt, Tancredo addressed the standing-room audience of 200-250 from behind a podium draped in a Confederate battle flag. To the congressman’s right, a portrait of Robert E. Lee peered out at the crowd of Minutemen activists, local politicians, and red-shirted members of LOS and the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The Confederate trappings of the event found a mismatch in Tancredo’s standard nativist polemic, which stayed clear of references to Southern heritage or direct plaudits for the LOS, a Southern white nationalist organization dedicated to “Southern independence, complete, full, and total.”
Tancredo’s encounter with the League of the South continued outside. On the steps of the museum, Tancredo held court with LOS officials and supporters in Confederate clothing. He held a batch of the materials being distributed at the barbeque, among them a copy of the The Citizen’s Informer, the newspaper of the Conservative Citizens Council, the racist organization that grew out of the segregationist White Citizens Councils of the 1950s. When questioned about the newspaper, Tancredo responded that he did not know its history.”
“The meeting with Tancredo and Bilbray — and the entire lobbying operation in mid-February — was masterminded by NumbersUSA, an anti-immigration group that had recently opened a “government relations office” in a three-story, red-brick Victorian near the Capitol.
http://www.splcenter.org/intel/intelreport/article.jsp?aid=93
Patrick McHugh of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which purports to be a squeaky clean think tank that rejects racism, was there pressing the flesh along with Barbara Coe, head of the California Coalition for Immigration Reform, who repeatedly referred to Mexicans — as she has for years — as “savages.”
The Citizens Informer, a white supremacist tabloid put out by the Council of Conservative Citizens hate group, was available.
voiceofreason (96a6ef) — 12/20/2007 @ 6:34 pmRACIST !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
JD (eadb61) — 12/20/2007 @ 7:34 pmVOR – Interesting that you give so much credibility to an organization whose business is hyping race conflict. Their record of reliability is suspect. How exactly do they define “Hate Group” by the way? Is the NAACP included?
Check out the following by Ken Silverstein in the 3/2/07 issue of Harpers:
Southern Poverty: richer than TongaBack in 2000, I wrote a story in Harper’s about the Southern Poverty Law Center of Montgomery, Alabama, whose stated mission is to combat disgusting yet mostly impotent groups like the Nazis and the KKK. What it does best, though, is to raise obscene amounts of money by hyping fears about the power of those groups; hence the SPLC has become the nation’s richest “civil rights” organization. The Center earns more from its vast investment portfolio than it spends on its core mission, which has led Millard Farmer, a death-penalty lawyer in Georgia, to once describe Morris Dees, the SPLC’s head, as “the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement” (adding, “I don’t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye”).
When in 1978 the Center’s treasury held less than $10 million, Dees said the group would stop fund-raising and live off interest when it hit $55 million. As he zeroed in on that target a decade later, Dees upped the ante to $100 million, which the group’s newsletter promised would allow it “to cease the costly and often unreliable task of fund raising.” At the time of my story seven years ago, the SPLC’s treasury bulged with $120 million, and the organization was spending twice as much on fund-raising as it did on legal services for victims of civil-rights abuses–yet its money-gathering machinery was still running without cease.
It’s still going. Last week, a reader sent me the SPLC’s 2005 financial filing with the IRS, which is required by law for charities. In five years, the SPLC’s treasury had grown by a further $48 million, bringing its total assets to $168 million. That’s more than the annual GDP of the Marshall Islands, and has the SPLC rapidly closing in on Tonga’s GDP.
Revenues listed for the 2005 filing came to about $44 million, which dwarfed total spending ($29 million). Of that latter amount, nearly $5 million was spent to raise even more money, and over $8 million was spent on salaries, benefits, and other compensation. The next time you get a fund-raising pitch from the SPLC, give generously—but give to a group that will make better use of your money. Like Global Witness
daleyrocks (906622) — 12/20/2007 @ 9:04 pmI don’t call many of the Republican Candidates solid on immigration and definitely not any of the big ones. So it the land of the blind, a one-eyed man like Romney is King.
Tancredo’s run was to influence the debate. At this point in time, those still in the race include, Thompson, Guiliani, Romney, and McCain in no particular order.
Out of that crowd, Romney looks good. Thompson and Guiliani supposedly are tough on illegal immigration but from what I can tell, they want to throw the door open to legal forms of immigration. Basically variations on eliminating the problem by changing the law so it isn’t a crime anymore. I don’t consider that a solution.
jpm100 (b48b29) — 12/20/2007 @ 10:04 pmVOR, even if I believed everything in that report from a clearly biased organization, I don’t see anything in there to make me question Tancredo’s principles. If you are going to set yourself up as an arbiter of other men’s consciences (a habit of which you seem inordinately fond) then you at least have to judge their actions based on their perceptions. In particular, you can’t judge what Tancredo was thinking at that even based on what you think the Confederacy symbolizes, you have to judge based on what Tancredo and the others at the event think that it symbolizes.
He talks to someone at an event and it turns out that the person may be associated with a group that wants to separate from the US. Never mind that half of San Francisco says the same thing, if Southerners say it then they are EVIL. Oh, and some random person hands him a newsletter from an organization that at one time in the distant past was segregationist. I eagerly await your condemnation of every politician who ever held a newsletter from Planned Parenthood –an organization originally dedicated to reducing the black population by way of abortion.
Doc Rampage (ebfd7a) — 12/20/2007 @ 10:21 pmDoc – The event was held at the South Carolina State Museum, which has a large Confederate Army display room. That’s where the meeting was held. A sponsor of the event the League of the South, vigorously contests the SPLC’s description of it as a hate group.
daleyrocks (906622) — 12/20/2007 @ 11:31 pmSPLC practices McCarthyism in a purer form than McCarthy himself practiced it. Their modus operandi is to constantly invent spurious “links” between conservatives and libertarians who deviate from the reigning PC othodoxy and real and alleged white racists and anti-semites.
For an understanding of the SPLC’s tactics:
sabanaoeste (004797) — 12/21/2007 @ 11:52 amhttp://www.fallacyfiles.org/guiltbya.html
I call bullshit on that jpm100. Unless of course, Romney wants to curtail proper legal immigration (?).
rhodeymark (9904ea) — 12/22/2007 @ 6:57 amFred on Immigrationhttp://www.fred08.com/virtual/Immigration.aspx
Sara, if you follow the news lately, there have been several stories about how enforcement has contributed to self-deportation. Cut off the benefits, so that employers can’t shuffle off their costs onto the taxpayers, and we’ll be 80% there.
SDN (a20b62) — 12/22/2007 @ 12:39 pm