Tom Tancredo Drops Out, Backs Romney

Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo dropped out of the race for the Republican Party’s nomination for president yesterday. Judging from the polls, most Americans never knew he was in it. He decided that resisting the inevitable would only harm his nation and his party, and therefore, he quit, throwing his rather insignificant electoral weight behind Governor Mitt Romney. However, he was not irrelevant to the race because he was the hardliner on immigration.

The Republican Party is split on the issue, and indeed, so is most of America. First, there are those who believe that immigrants, legal or not, are a cultural threat to the US. Second, there are those who believe that the problem with immigration stems from the word “illegal” that is usually ahead of it. Third, there are those who don’t resist the idea of immigration much at all or even encourage it because it allegedly holds labor costs down (depresses wages and salaries) to the benefit of shareholders.

The big split in the GOP is between the business interests and the cultural conservatives. This tension has been there since the Reagan years, but the desire for power helped both paper over their differences. Now, though, because of Mr. Tancredo and the TV musings of Lou Dobbs and others, the GOP has to decide what it stands for on immigration – the protection of an Anglophone America or free movement of labor in a capitalist system. The gap can’t be bridged much longer.

The ugly fact is that there was always a whiff of racism, anti-Mexican largely, about the Tancredo campaign. The man himself is innocent of the charge, but the same can not be said for some of those he attracted. As the Hispanic population in America grows, most of those Americans will not forget to which party Mr. Tancredo belongs. The Democrats will be the long-term beneficiaries of the Tancredo effort.

However, the country hasn’t heard the last of Mr. Tancredo. Colorado’s senior US Senator Wayne Allard is retiring in 2008. While the state is shifting to the Democrats, the name recognition this campaign brought Mr. Tancredo might be sufficient for him to run. And if not, Senator Ken Salazar is up for re-election in 2010 when the landscape will inevitably be different.

© Copyright 2007 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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