I believe that, during this decade, Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO) has been America's MVP:
Most Valuable Politician.
Think about it.
The President of the United States has had two main goals over the last six years:
The American Establishment had some qualms about the former. But they gave him the green light anyway. And, despite catastrophe in Iraq, they may nevertheless let him start another war - this time with Iran.
In contrast, our elites have strongly supported the Presidents' obsession with opening the borders even further. Miraculously, it hasn't happened…yet.
More than any other individual, Rep. Tancredo, who founded the Congressional Immigration Reform Caucus back in 1999, has stood athwart history, yelling "Stop." Without this organized opposition in the House, the President and Senate surely would have saddled us with legislation at least as bad as last May's Hagel-Martinez bill.
Now, Rep. Tancredo has formed a committee to explore running for President in 2008. Having repeatedly explained in the past that he's "too fat, too short and too bald" to run for President, Tancredo has his work cut out to break out above the level of, say, fellow potential Presidential candidate Rep. Ron Paul, the Texas libertarian Republican who seems too principled to have any chance of making a splash in the race.
And Tancredo will have to be ready to put up with the mindless hatred that any patriot concerned about America's future must endure.
For example, Tancredo has been exposed to cheap shots from both the American Spectator [Tancredo's Dubious Allies, by The Prowler, January 17, 2007] robustly answered by readers' mail and the original London Spectator. [The man who would bomb Mecca, by James Forsyth, January 29, 2007]
British journalism is so much more articulate than American journalism that we easily-impressed colonials can overlook its tendency toward laziness leading to downright ignorance. Yet, in this Age of Google, the Brit writer's penchant for pounding out 500 words of off-the-top-of-the-head smugness before heading out to a liquid lunch really doesn't cut it anymore.
The Spectator's James Forsyth's take on the dangers of Tancredo's candidacy to the Emerging Hispanic Republican Majority sounds like something Michael Barone was publishing in 2001 after getting the inside word from Karl "The Genius" Rove. (Funny how nobody calls Rove a genius anymore …)
Last week, I explained why the Los Angeles school board's decision to require students to pass Algebra II to graduate from high school was absurd. Nonetheless, I do think that insisting pundits show they understand, oh, 6th grade arithmetic would be right - and fitting.
The Bush-Rove Plan rests on the theory that, while the GOP would lose ground for every new immigrant voter imported, it would make up for it on volume.
Not surprisingly, this logic has proven instantly persuasive to most opinion mongers.
So here's a number even they might be able to understand:
According to Hispanic Business, among "Hispanic elected officials affiliated with a party, 92 percent are Democrats and 8 percent Republicans…"
Boosting the number of Hispanic voters creates wildly more Democratic than Republican leaders. And leaders tend to have followers.
The overwhelming Democratic skew among Latino politicians stems in part from the Voting Rights Act, which mandates the gerrymandering of so many "minority-majority" districts that are safe Democratic seats.
If you are a politically ambitious young Hispanic, it makes all the sense in the world to sign up as a Democrat because your chance of getting elected to a starter office such as state assemblyman as a Republican is very small if you run in a heavily Hispanic district.
When these kind of unpleasant realities about immigration are explained to Establishment Republicans, you always hear the reply: "Well, then, the problem isn't immigration. It just means that all we have to do is repeal the Voting Rights Act."
Yeah, well, Congress just extended the VRA last July by overwhelming majorities. So that's not going to happen.
Of course, you hear this kind of pie-in-the-sky response all the time. If you point out that America is importing lots of bad students who are dragging down the public school system, the automatic reply you get back is: "All we have to do is fix the schools so that no child is left behind".
As if anybody knows how to do that.
In fact, America has a lot of problems that we have no clue how to solve.
We do, however, know one simple way to stop making many of our difficulties worse: cut back on immigration.
Tom Tancredo understands that. Do any of the other candidates?
[Steve Sailer [email him] is founder of the Human Biodiversity Institute and movie critic for The American Conservative. His website www.iSteve.blogspot.com features his daily blog.]
