Was Tom Tancredo Ever Really Running For President?

Tom Tancredo announced today that he would be quitting the presidential race. As with most things Tancredo, the Colorado Republican's decision has left me with some very mixed feelings. My big beef with Tancredo all along has been that he was so concerned with one issue -- illegal immigration -- that he neglected most all other issues. I don't think any one issue is important enough to elect a president based solely on his or her stance on that issue, so I've felt for a long time that Tancredo was the weakest candidate in the race. I've also felt for a while that Tancredo himself was not really that set on becoming president. Rather, I felt like he was using the prominence and media time afforded to him as a presidential candidate to talk about illegal immigration. He ran more of a crusade than a campaign, and he seems to believe that he was very successful in pushing an oft-ignored issue into the forefront of American political discourse. Perhaps Tancredo did do all he wanted to do, but I still feel unhappy that he would quit the presidential race just as it was entering its most exciting period. I don't see other longshot presidential candidates of principle like Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich dropping out on the eve of the primaries -- those candidates are going to keep promulgating their ideas as long as they can remain in the public spotlight, and they will at least give their supporters an opportunity to cast votes on their behalf. Tancredo has denied his supporters that opportunity. Some of them will no doubt vote for their former candidate's endorsee, Mitt Romney, but I wouldn't be surprised if quite a few Tancredites are feeling dazed and confused tonight. Tancredo was certainly the most consistent and impassioned opponent of illegal immigration running for president; it's hard to say how much of the rhetoric other candidates spew about illegal immigration is not simply lip service rather than an exposition of genuinely held beliefs. Illegal immigration, after all, is one thing that very few candidates would actually come out and support for fear of angering a sizable portion of the electorate; Mike Gravel is an exception to this general rule, as usual.

I did think that Tom Tancredo had a role to play in this election even though he wasn't a particularly impressive candidate. Many people seem to dismiss the man as a hatemonger, a racist, and a nativist, but I don't think those characterizations are necessarily fair based on Tancredo's public presentation of his ideas. The nativist label actually does fit the man pretty well -- certainly Tancredo made it clear that he was all about preserving America's present culture and opposing immigration because it threatened that predominant culture. Although illegal immigration earned his deepest ire, Tancredo also was willing to state that he would like to see a moratorium on immigration in general. I don't think Tancredo generally expressed his nativist views in a particularly hateful way, but he no doubt echoed many arguments previously expressed by those opposed to Irish, Italian, Polish, Asian, and other immigration in America's not-so-distant past who did not always even try to hide their prejudices against certain ethnic groups. However, this nativism was only part of Tancredo's larger argument; to me, his most powerful criticisms of illegal immigration centered on economic issues. American "culture" is a very hard thing to pin down, but anyone can understand that an influx of cheap labor could be very bad for people who want to work for a decent (preferably high) wage. Likewise, the self-evident fact that illegal immigrants are people and as such have as much need for services as anyone else makes it easy to understand that illegal immigration can impact health care (and cost us money). Tancredo was excellent at linking illegal immigration to other issues like the cost of health care and the future of Social Security; in my opinion, it is that ability that is most lacking in the other candidates who claim to oppose illegal immigration. Thus, Tancredo's role in this election was to provide a voice for Americans who are worried about illegal immigration for a wide variety of reasons. The other candidates will continue to speak to those Americans, but I'm not sure any of them will be able to speak for them quite as Tancredo did.