Bill Berkowitz
January 25, 2007

Tom Tancredo's mission

The Republican congressman from Colorado will try to woo GOP voters with anti-immigration rhetoric and a boatload of Christian right politics

These days, probably the most recognizable name in anti-immigration politics is Colorado Republican Congressman Tom Tancredo. Over the past year, Tancredo has gone from a little known congressman to a highly visible anti-immigration spokesperson. "Tancredo has thoroughly enmeshed himself in the anti-immigration movement and with the help of CNN talk show host Lou Dobbs, he has been given a national megaphone," Devin Burghart, the program director of the Building Democracy Initiative at the Center for New Community, a Chicago-based civil rights group, told Media Transparency.

Now, Tancredo (website), who has represented the state's Sixth District since 1999, has joined the long list of candidates contending for the GOP's 2008 presidential nomination. In mid-January Tancredo announced the formation of an exploratory committee -- Tom Tancredo for a Secure America -- the first step to formally declaring his candidacy. While his announcement didn't cause quite the stir as the announcement by Illinois Democratic Senator Barak Obama that he too was forming an exploratory committee, nevertheless Tancredo's move did not go completely unnoticed.

While voters' concerns over the war in Iraq and the GOP's "culture of corruption" predominated in the 2006 midterms, Tancredo will be doing his best to make immigration an issue for the presidential campaign of 2008.

Tancredo tosses his hat in the ring

Previously Tancredo had said that if others took up the immigration issue he would not become a candidate. "Unfortunately, no one in the top tier conveys a concern about this issue," Tancredo said at the time of his announcement. He was especially critical of Arizona Republican Senator John McCain -- who, along with former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, are the GOP's early frontrunners -- for co-sponsoring guest-worker legislation with Senator Ted Kennedy that Tancredo called "the McKennedy bill."

In a field bursting with conservative candidates, Tancredo will be counting on his anti-immigration credentials and ties to anti-immigrant organizations to win support from GOP primary voters. And if he can't win, he hopes to at least convince other GOP candidates to follow his lead on the immigration issue.

According to the Des Moines Register's David Yepsin, Tancredo "could be a real factor in Iowa's leadoff 2008 caucuses." After all, as Yepson pointed out, such right wing stalwarts as Pat Buchanan, Pat Robertson, Alan Keyes, Gary Bauer, and Steve Forbes all "ran strong caucus races in Iowa." And while they all lost, "they had an impact by forcing the leading candidates to speak to their issues -- and by energizing new people to get involved in the process."

"While Tancredo has to be ranked as the longest of presidential long shots," Yepson noted, "he has the potential to pull the Republican field of candidates to the right, particularly on his signature issue of curbing illegal immigration."

A spokesperson for the Washington, DC-based Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a longtime anti-immigration organization, "believes ...Tancredo will have the support of a lot of ordinary Americans now that he has officially announced his intention to form a 2008 Presidential exploratory committee," OneNewsNow, a Christian News Service sponsored by the American Family Association, recently reported.

Susan Tully, national field director for FAIR, said that Tancredo "has a tremendous following," as "80 to 90 percent of Americans think illegal immigration is a problem." According to OneNewsNow, Tully "believes these concerned citizens will be pleased and excited over the congressman's plan to make immigration the campaign's 'number-one issue.'"

Tully allowed that while Tancredo "will never have the money that the other candidates are going to have, and he's never going to have the party support ... he has the people's support, and it's going to take a grassroots effort."

Credibility on social issues challenged

Tancredo has insisted that immigration is only one of many traditional family values issues that he is concerned about. According to the Des Moines Register, Tancredo "said he has a long record of support for pro-life and pro-family causes, opposition to gay marriage and fiscal discipline. 'I have a lot of credibility on those conservative principles. I don't see anybody at this time who puts all that together. It's more than just the immigration issue.'"

A recent report in the American Spectator, however, directly challenged Tancredo's anti-abortion credentials. Written by someone calling himself "The Prowler," the story titled "Tancredo's Dubious Allies" maintains that the congressman has taken a substantial amount of money from pro-abortion contributors.

A staffer for one of Tancredo's colleagues in the House of Representatives told "The Prowler" that Tancredo is "going to paint himself as a mainstream conservative. But the folks he's associating with are not part of the mainstream."

According to the American Spectator, "campaign finance reports" show that "one of Tancredo's biggest financial backers has been the family of Dr. John Tanton, the founder of the Federation for American Immigration Reform," and "one of the most prominent conservative financiers of Planned Parenthood in the United States, having helped found in the mid-1960s the first Planned Parenthood chapter in northern Michigan."

Tancredo has "accepted more than $20,000 from the FAIR PAC and personal donations from Tanton between 1996 and 2006," the American Spectator reported. "Over the past ten years, according to Federal Election Commission reports, FAIR has provided more than $15,000 to Tancredo campaigns and PACs. Tanton has given Tancredo $7,000, while donating $28,000 to FAIR's political action arm."

A consultant for a Republican House member from a western state told the conservative magazine that "Republicans and social conservatives need to be asking Tancredo some tough questions. I don't believe he's a pro-life candidate, not by a long shot, and the people he's associated with, who back him, are not part of the mainstream. To disavow these people now is just too late."

Tancredo's Christian nation

A Right Web profile described Tancredo as "a social conservative aligned with the Christian Right, [who] is also an enthusiastic supporter of the Bush administration's war on terror, including the Iraq War. A consistent supporter of the Pentagon and U.S. defense industries, Tancredo has become a leading spokesperson in the House for an Iran regime change."

Tancredo started his political career in Colorado's House of Representatives in the late 1970s, "where he teamed up with other social conservatives and new right advocates--a group that then-Governor Dick Lamm called "House crazies"--to push for a number of socially conservative polices, including slashing taxes and cutting social services," Right Web pointed out. After serving two terms, Tancredo, a former junior high school history teacher in Denver, "was appointed in 1981 to head the regional office of the Department of Education in the Reagan administration."

Four years later he "distribute[d] to teachers a speech by a former colleague that called for a 'truly Christian educational system' and bemoaned the 'godlessness' in a country founded as a 'Christian nation.' Despite the ensuing controversy, Tancredo kept his position and was reappointed by President George H. W. Bush in 1989."

From 1993 to 1998, Tancredo served as president of the Independence Institute (website), described by Right Web as a Golden, Colorado-based "right-wing think tank .... [that] weighs in on an array of state issues, including government spending, education policy, and social issues. Its Board of Trustees includes Jeff Coors of Coors Brewing, a philanthropist involved in right-wing foundations established by the Coors family, including Castle Rock Foundation."

Five months after coming to Washington, Tancredo formed the House Immigration Reform Caucus whose mission statement says that "The caucus gives members an opportunity to address the strong concerns about immigration that constituents have relayed to them. It also exists as an outlet for members and staff to discuss how current laws and regulation pose a threat to the security of America." (For more on the Immigration Reform Caucus see here.)

Raising his national profile

Over the Memorial Day weekend in 2005, Tancredo delivered the keynote address to about 400 attendees at an anti-immigration confab in Las Vegas. According to a report by Leonard Zeskind, the author of a forthcoming book on the history of the white nationalist movement for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Tancredo is a "ubiquitous presence" at anti-immigration "rallies and meetings."

To Tancredo, California's Proposition 187 was the "primal scream of the people of California," which he described as being under "political, economic, and cultural siege," Zeskind reported. He also pointed out, in his November 2005 piece for the American Prospect magazine titled "The New Nativism", that "Tancredo trades on his role as a Capitol Hill insider to enhance his standing in a far-flung movement. And in Congress his reputation far exceeds his backbencher status, precisely because of his standing among angry Middle Americans.

"In Las Vegas, Tancredo was alternately humble and proud, comic and serious. He distanced himself from President Bush with a quip about the Minutemen's border watch the previous April. 'The same day the president was calling them vigilantes, I was in Arizona calling them heroes,' he gloated."

In his extensive profile of Tancredo, and his ties to the anti-immigration movement, Zeskind maintained that the Colorado congressman "epitomizes an ominous overlap between seemingly respectable Republican anti-immigration activists and the white nationalist movement."

Zeskind pointed out how Tancredo's immigration caucus had grown to more than 90 members, and how "it promotes legislation to reduce legal immigration, plug the borders, and, in its own words, 'address the widespread problem of voting by illegal aliens.' It also seeks to pass legislation denying citizenship to children born in the United States if their parents are undocumented residents. This goal is explicitly contradicted by the Constitution, which declares that any person born in the United States is a citizen."

On a somewhat prescient note, Zeskind allowed that Tancredo"could well run in the 2008 presidential primaries." He had already made visits to New Hampshire and Iowa, where "he held three house party fund-raisers ...sponsored by local Christian Coalition activists." According to Zeskind, "Tancredo knows this constituency well, dating back to his days as a Colorado state legislator, and he has also spoken twice in Georgia at the Christian Coalition's annual conventions. His trip to Iowa was tightly managed by Bay Buchanan, and he seems to be following the path left by Bay's brother Pat in 1992 and '96."

A recent Denver Post editorial noted that "According to a Tancredo aide, his state director for New Hampshire led the charge for Pat Buchanan in 1996 when he defeated Bob Dole in that state's primary." In addition, Tancredo's Team America (website) -- "a political action committee dedicated to securing our nation's borders" -- is chaired by Bay Buchanan. Team America's mission "is to make this issue a significant part of the national political debate and to identify, recruit, and help elect to public office individuals who are committed to enforcing our laws and securing our borders."

Tancredo's new book "In Mortal Danger: The Battle for America's Border and Security," and Pat Buchanan's latest bestseller, "State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America" are both prominently featured at the Team America website.

While Tancredo's campaign is a long-shot at best, "the temptation is to think that Tancredo's appeal is too narrow for the wide canvas of a presidential campaign," the Denver Post editorialized. "But those Pat Buchanan connections are a reminder that an insurgent effort can sometimes have a lingering half-life."

One of the most significant things that could emerge from Tancredo's campaign "is the further advancement of the anti-immigration infrastructure," Devin Burghart pointed out. "Much as we saw with the campaign of Pat Robertson in 1988 -- which led to the launching of the Christian Coalition -- the Tancredo run has the potential to create a more extensive national anti-immigrant political operation."