Tom Tancredo: Obama A Greater Threat Than Al Qaeda
Tom Tancredo, currently running as the Constitution Party candidate for Governor of California Colorado, believes that the President of the United States is a greater threat to America than Osama bin Laden:
DENVER — Tom Tancredo is quick to admit he brings plenty of baggage to the Colorado governor’s race.
Like the time he called Miami a “Third World country.” Or when he got thrown out of the White House for suggesting then-President George W. Bush was soft on illegal immigration. Or when he refused to take part in a presidential debate because it was on a Spanish-language network.
This week, he added more fuel to the fire when he said President Barack Obama is a bigger threat to the United States than al-Qaida or terrorism.
But despite all the baggage, the immigration hard-liner is running a solid campaign for governor as a third-party candidate and is within the margin of error in several recent polls.
Tancredo has successfully courted tea party groups, capitalized on anti-incumbent anger and parlayed his trademark blunt talk on the issues to become the de facto Republican candidate. Tancredo has also taken advantage of the collapse of GOP nominee Dan Maes, who is polling in single digits amid a series of character issues and campaign gaffes.
Tancredo is a former Republican lawmaker who left Congress in 2008 to mount a longshot White House bid that was largely based on an anti-immigration platform. He quit the GOP this year after saying that the Republicans in the governor’s race couldn’t win.
He got on the ballot as the American Constitution Party candidate – and has been surging in the polls ever since.
Democrat John Hickenlooper, the popular mayor of Denver, remains the favorite and a formidable candidate given his fundraising lead, but he has never made it above 50 percent in most polls.
The Canon City Daily Record reported that Tancredo told a coffee shop crowd Tuesday that Obama posed a threat to the Constitution, saying: “It’s not al-Qaida, it’s the guy sitting in the White House.”
Despite this, Tancredo has a very good shot at being the next Governor of Colorado:
As Steven Taylor noted about a month ago, it truly is The Year Of The Odd Candidate.
That’s a picture of the Florida Senate race polling data, not the Colorado Gubernatorial race…
Embedded the wrong image there. Fixed
Just FYI, your first sentence says California instead of Colorado.
His comment that Al-Qaida isn’t a threat to the Constitution isn’t really true. We’ve basically tossed the 4th Amendment since 9/11, and perhaps degraded one or two others significantly. I’ve yet to see Obama make a move on the 2nd Amendment.
That graph is profound. Not only does it show a very weird race, but it hints at some very weird thinking.
Dan Maes’s early support seems to be based solely on party affiliation. “Oh, he’s the Republican? He’s the one I support then.” But as Maes’s deficiencies as a candidate were exposed, you see a rapid drop in support, people saying, “I don’t care if he’s the Republican. I can’t support him.”
These people didn’t go into Hickenlooper’s camp. That much is clear. Hickenlooper’s had steadily rising support (which means Democrats + independents and maybe some conservatives) for months, no major bumps, but no big dips either.
No, the people who abandoned Maes still want a conservative as governor. Enter Tom Tancredo with his weirdness. He sits languishing in the polls until Mid-September, when it’s clear to any observer that Dan Maes is an embarrassing joke, and then Tancredo starts to get some support.
But what support! Almost half of it seems to be the same uninformed partisans who voted for Dan Maes in the primary and are just now realizing that a Democrat (, a Democrat!) just might win.