With all the starting, stalling, faltering and falling that the Colorado Republicans are doing right now, we were not much surprised when people began suggesting a run by a third-party candidate.
We were just a little surprised at who jumped up from the back of the room shouting, “I will, I will!”
Former Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo has long held a stance that the Tea Party should resist any inclination on becoming a third party. Now he has seriously suggested that he can be a viable candidate under the auspices of the American Constitution Party. If one thinks the left has had some decent rotten tomatoes to toss at the Republicans that are now running, just wait until they get a chance at Tancredo. You can bet that the shouts of him wanting to reinstate the rules of the Jim Crow era will come flying out the very day he becomes any sort of candidate whatsoever. A transcript of his speech before the Tea Party last February is blinking on the desktop of every liberal news reporter in the state and probably the nation.
The party in power now would like nothing better than to announce on high Olympus (or maybe Mount Evans) that they had succeeded in holding back the resurgence of the conservatives and kept a Democrat in the Governor’s Mansion. And Tom Tancredo may well be their best chance of doing just that. He may be the best campaign strategy to date for the Hickenlooper camp.
He already began his attack on his former Republican friends when he claimed that the problems with the Scott McInnis’ plagiarism and Dan Maes’ campaign finance violations were the fault of Dick Wadhams. Wadhams is correct when he says his job is not to pick candidates and manage campaigns; his job is to facilitate the relationship between the party and those who are running under the party’s banner for election.
Tancredo may be right in his assessment that the Colorado Republicans have a mess to clean up, but they are the only ones that can do that, and the introduction of a third party candidate is certainly not in their interest while attempting to clean up that mess.
The Colorado Republicans had better get behind the candidate that walks away with the win in the primary and launch an all-out forgive-and-forget blitz that will make the Clintons look like amateurs, otherwise, it may be a good idea for us to start practicing the spelling of Hickenlooper and be prepared for at least another four years of the taxes, fees and spending we have witnessed during the Ritter fiasco.
