My battle report: The GOP war on liberty candidates
Article subtitle:
Tom Tancredo on how establishment forces from across nation targeted him
Article publisher:
World Net Daily
Article date:
13 July 2014
Article category:
Colorado News
Medium
Article Body:
...In Colorado as well, the Republican gubernatorial primary picture was not pretty.
On June 24 the GOP establishment won a narrow victory – less than 14,000 votes (or 3 percent) separated first and second place. They won by pursuing a scorched-earth policy against the liberty movement’s leading challenger to the status quo – Tom Tancredo. I think it important to share the main outlines of this story so the liberty movement can learn from this experience...
Unlike Mississippi, in Colorado, the establishment could not openly or easily mobilize Democratic voters to cross over and vote for my opponent. But they could and did use lies and ugly distortions and the desperate tactic of “independent expenditure committees” to finance the nastiest media attacks.
The chairman of the Colorado Republican Party, Ryan Call, sent out two blast emails that essentially begged Republicans to vote for the party establishment’s preferred candidate. I’ve never seen anything like that before..
And perhaps the most bizarre twist of all, a massive buy of attack ads was purchased through a Massachusetts campaign group called Red Curve. It turned out the group was a Mitt Romney creation run by his former staffers. A blast email was then sent out by Romney for President Inc. with the same attack theme. More to the point, there is evidence that the motivation for this package of attack ads originated with New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and others at the Republican Governors Association, although the RGA likely did not put any of its own money into the project. Christie and his RGA friends simply used the Romney-created group as the vehicle for funding the Colorado attack ads against me.
When the fiction of me being a one-issue candidate failed to gain traction, the party establishment resorted to inventing things out of whole cloth. They created a new and dishonest issue by claiming I wanted to legalize hard, addictive drugs like heroin and cocaine on top of the legal marijuana that Colorado voters had approved by a 55-45 margin in the 2012 election. This was a complete distortion of a speech I made five years ago saying the “war on drugs” was a failure. I still believe that, but I never advocated legalizing hard drugs in the same fashion as marijuana.
It was impossible to counter the barrage of lies when my campaign was outspent 8-to-1 on radio-TV advertisements, most of that coming from the “independent” groups, not candidate committees...
I believe it was, in fact, the growing likelihood that I would win in November that spooked the establishment. In the end, the Republican establishment – in Denver, Washington, New York and New Jersey – decided four more years of progressive Democrat John Hickenlooper is preferable to four years of conservative Gov. Tancredo.
That is the main lesson of the 2014 election season thus far. The Republican establishment fears the liberty movement more than it fears continued Democratic control of government.
CAIRCO Notes
Tom Tancredo has maintained a strong position on immigration sanity over the years. Sadly, halting illegal immigration simply is not in the playbook for GOP fat cat elites. They would rather see the country sink under the tidewaters of open borders while profiteering from the overwhelming surge of cheap labor.