Somehow the Colorado Republicans ended up with a purely establishment candidate vs. a Tea Party candidate with an incredibly thin record in the primary. Big mistake. The establishment candidate turns out to be a plagiarist (paid $300K for someone else’s work) while the Tea Party choice seems to have taken some serious liberty on his resume regarding his business success and his football prowess.
Failed presidential candidate Tom Tancredo has stepped in to the mess, demanding that the two Republicans drop out of the race or he will run on the ticket of the American Constitution Party. The chairman of the Colorado Republican Party is furious:
I am terribly disappointed in Tom Tancredo’s announcement that he has made a backroom deal with a minor political party to run for governor.
Tom Tancredo used the Colorado Republican Party to get elected to the Colorado House of Representatives in the 1970’s, to work as a political appointee in the Reagan administration in the 1980’s, and to get elected to Congress from 1998 to 2008. But now it appears he wants to destroy Republican chances to win a governor’s race after four failed years of Bill Ritter.
This past December, Tom Tancredo wrote a compelling op-ed calling on Tea Party and 9-12 activists to not form a third party because previous conservative third parties “succeeded in electing the more liberal candidate after many conservatives waste their votes on a third party candidate.” Tom Tancredo should remember his own words.
Let there be no mistake about it: Regardless of who our nominee is for governor after the primary, if Tom Tancredo carries through on his threat to run as a third party candidate, he will be responsible for the election of Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper as governor and for other races that will be imperiled as well.
The American Constitution Party’s platform calls for the elimination of congressional salaries and pensions. I assume when Tom Tancredo becomes that minor party’s nominee, he will forego his own congressional pension and will reimburse American taxpayers for the ten years of congressional salary he drew.
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Not long ago, state Republicans stood a decent chance at taking the Governor’s mansion when the current occupant, Dem Bill Ritter, left it at the end of his first term. Then the front runner in the Republican primary, Scott McInnes, self-immolated with the disclosure that he was paid $300,000 for a few essays on water rights that he in fact didn’t write and were plagiarised. The second candidate, Dan Maes, has a number of questionable assertions on his resume, including his record as a “sucessful” businessman (his reported income on his tax returns were below the poverty line for a couple of years) and his reported football prowess that nobody can find a record of.
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Enter Tom Tancredo.</strong>
In a stunning late afternoon development, Tancredo has demanded that both candidates must drop out of the race or he will enter it as the candidate of the American Constitution Party, whatever that is. Tancredo has effectively engineered that first great split between the Teabaggers and the Republican establishment, and the establishment is pissed. This is a complete meltdown of the right, and the best part is that Colorado’s next Governor, John Hickenlooper, hasn’t had to spend a dime to make it happen. Tom Tancredo always comes through in the clutch with a crazy move or statement.
Statement from Colorado Republican Chairman Dick Wadhams: