Tancredo campaign: more scare tactics
By Cindy Rodriguez
Denver Post Staff Columnist
The Denver Post
Article Last Updated:04/08/2007 12:06:09 AM MDT

Call Tom Tancredo the no-chance candidate, a one-trick pony.

While he may not be a real contender, the Colorado congressman has a million dollars and a dream: to push the issue of undocumented immigration to the forefront of the 2008 presidential campaign.

It's the sole reason he's running for prez.

In many ways Tancredo is like Al Sharpton, the Democratic challenger of the '04 race who knew he couldn't win but used his platform to talk in no-nonsense fashion about civil rights issues.

You have to admire someone who is passionate about an issue, even if you disagree with him. But Tancredo borders on the obsessive. It's evident in his actions.

He's hung out along the Mexican border with gun-toting "Minutemen" vigilantes who dress in camouflage and wear night-vision goggles.

At a California rally he held up a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "America is full."

He said Miami, a city that is majority Latino, resembles a "third-world country."

And in South Carolina he didn't mind speaking in a room draped with Confederate battle flags, where men dressed in Confederate regalia sang "Dixie," an offensive song that came out of blackface minstrel shows of the 1850s, mocking freed slaves.

It's understandable why Esquire magazine called him "Tancrazy."

While political analysts call him a fringe candidate, that fringe is vocal. I should know: I hear from them regularly.

But it would be unfair to call them all unreasonable, especially if their reasoning is based on lies fed to them by the likes of hate-radio host Peter Boyles and politicians such as Tancredo.

Who has time to research the pros and cons of illegal immigration? The word "illegal" alone determines the way a lot of people think.

Rather than trying to understand the grays, it's easier to accept the myths: that undocumented immigrants take jobs away from Americans, that those workers bring wages down, that illegal immigrants are dangerous people who want to live off welfare.

It reminds of me an episode of "The Twilight Zone" where on happy-go-lucky Maple Street neighbors become suspicious of each other because of power outages caused, unbeknownst to them, by Martians. They wind up hurling rocks at each other.

Rod Serling's closing narration is still relevant: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy, and the thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all of its own for the children, and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone."

It explains comments like this one posted on a Denver Post blog: "We have more Mexican citizens per square mile here than most places in Mexico. Trouble is, they're not immigrants. Immigration is fine - breaking in isn't. Most of our Mexicans (including the legal ones) aren't immigrants in their hearts. They have ZERO interest in becoming Americans. Calling them undocumented migrants or giving them some other 'soft-talk' name is like calling your daughter's rapist 'my undocumented son-in-law."'

Tancredo has a following all right; much of it comes from creating fear and tapping into people's anger.

What these folks don't realize is they're aligning themselves with a man who doesn't address education, employment or health-care issues of middle-class families.

Instead, Tancredo will play on emotional social issues, borrowing a tactic that conservatives have been using for decades. He'll rail against abortion, gay marriage and embryonic stem cell research, with his main issue being illegal immigration.

Donations may be trickling in - Tancredo has $1 million in his campaign chest- but that is nickels and dimes. (New York Sen. Hillary Clinton has 36 times that amount - yes, $36 million - in her coffer.)

It's probably enough for a fringe candidate who has said himself he has no way of winning the presidency.

I just hope his fear-mongering doesn't appeal much beyond his fringe fan base, to the people who live on Maple Street.

Cindy Rodríguez's column appears Tuesdays and Sundays. Visit Cindy's blog at denverpostbloghouse.com/rodriguez


http://www.denverpost.com/business/ci_5586555