Littwin: Tancredo's wall power

By Mike Littwin, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Published January 31, 2006 at midnight

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PHOENIX - At some point, the president of the United States will have to get behind the Statue of Liberty or Tom Tancredo's wall. - editorial from The Wall Street Journal

Tom Tancredo has gone respectable.

It was the last thing you could have ever guessed. And certainly it wasn't anything he had planned.

He's a bomb thrower. Or a bomb dropper - if the hypothetical bomb site is, say, Mecca. It's who he is. It's what he does.

But now Rep. Tancredo, once considered by many thoughtful people to be simply a crackpot, has morphed, almost without warning, into a crackpot who's also a major political player.

I don't expect it to last. Neither does Tancredo.

"That's not me," he says. "I go outside to build a fire and hope it raises the temperature inside. That's exactly who I am."

But, suddenly, he gets a respectful page one profile in The New York Times. He gets a respectful page one profile in the Los Angeles Times.

The Wall Street Journal writes a scathing editorial about Tancredo and the proposed 700-mile fence along the Mexican border that he is touting.

Because he's still Tom Tancredo, the Journal article is the one he loves to quote.

"They call it the Tancredo wall," he tells a breakfast crowd here. He pauses for effect. "It has a certain ring to it."

What's changed is that to the surprise of almost everyone, including Tancredo, maybe especially Tancredo, the House has passed a bill on illegal immigration that includes his fence. Once, the Republican congressman was easy to ignore or, at least, dismiss. In fact, dismissing Tancredo was for many, even in his own party, a default position.

I mean, Karl Rove didn't just dismiss him. He once told him never to darken the White House door again. Tancredo immediately called the press. Never Darken Door is now at the top of his resume.

But then illegal immigration became a hot issue in the culture wars. And when House Republicans looked around for someone standing at the sharp end of the wedge, there was Tancredo. As hard as they looked, there was no one else.

Once, Tancredo just talked loudly and mostly on C-SPAN at 2:30 a.m. Now he's found an enormous stick - his anti-immigration House caucus and ready access to CNN anchor Lou Dobbs and, of course, the entire Fox News staff.

"Now, at least when I see my colleagues coming down the hall, they don't automatically step to the other side," he says, and the crowd roars.

It is a recent Thursday morning. And Tancredo is on tour. I've come to see if respectability has changed him, or at least that's how I sold the story to my editors.

I know Tancredo better than that. Maybe he is a real political player these days, but, still, he's never too far from advocating the bombing of a Muslim holy site or implying that the mayor of Denver is an accessory to murder.

Team Tancredo is traveling in a giant RV - for the environmentos, that's $155 for a fill-up - through Arizona and New Mexico on what he is calling his Secure America Now tour. He was just in Iowa.

Let me ask you: Do you feel secure with Tom Tancredo on the job? I'll give him this. At least he's unarmed. On the other hand, he thinks the solution is to send the Army to the border.

In Iowa, Tancredo was attending a pre-pre-pre-presidential caucus. He is threatening, as you've heard, to run for president, setting up the chance to become the Italian-American version of Alan Keyes. Prominent politicos, Tancredo confides, had to come to his hospitality suite to ask if he'd send some of his overflow crowd to their rooms. He's got the itch.

On this Thursday, he is up early for two pre-breakfast hours of radio. The night before, as soon as he got in from the airport, he went to a talk-radio studio, where the host offered this solution: a Mexican revolution. I guess he missed the first couple.

"They need to put some blood on the ground and fight for the freedom that we have fought for for years," the host is saying. It's that kind of tour.

Tancredo looks like he always does - as he likes to say, short and balding. His standard line is that he loves Mexicans - because, he says, like Italians, "we're both gregarious, big-hearted, hardworking and short." He's wearing a dark sports jacket and tannish slacks. He looks like the middle school social studies teacher he used to be, long before he became the taxpayer-subsidized agitator he is now.

His message is that the evil Senate is about to gut his recently passed House immigration bill by adding a guest-worker plan. Guest worker, he says, is code for amnesty. And amnesty - the very word sends shudders at every Tancredo stop - will mean more illegal immigration, and America, already at the brink of ruin, will get there even sooner. You may have heard this argument before. I hear it in speech after speech.

In Arizona, he says the villain of the piece is either Arizona Sen. John McCain - co-sponsor of the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill - or the president himself, whom Tancredo has stopped just short of calling a traitor on this issue. On this trip, Tancredo is calling Republicans to account - saying Republicans are beholden to businesses addicted to cheap labor - and if Karl Rove doesn't like what he says, all the better.

The fence is, of course, the centerpiece of the bill. He concedes the fence is not a panacea for illegal immigration, but he's all for the symbolism.

The Wall Street Journal says the fence would make America the world's largest gated community. Tancredo loves that symbolism. He wants demarcation - a fence, a road, another fence. Something that says us and them.

"It's a symbol I kind of like," he says. "It's a symbol of where one country ends and another begins. It's a symbol of national sovereignty. There's a distinct nation here called the United States of America. And what's wrong with that?"

But, as we drive through the Southwest, the Tancredo wall comes to mean many things. For Tancredo, you see, there is symbolism and there is symbolism. And there are walls and there are walls.

I come on a trip to see how Tancredo is handling his newfound position, and find a man struggling with life as he has always known it. There are walls between people and walls between peoples. There are walls between mothers and fathers and walls between mothers and fathers and sons.

On a three-day trip, we somehow get to all that. His mother, I learn, is in a hospice near death, and the trip might have to be cut short. He tells me that he never learned how to mourn his father or to mourn his lost childhood, when he struggled with depression. It's immigration he has come here to discuss, but as we watch the Arizona desert pass by, it's family he wants to talk about. Somehow he doesn't get the irony - of the families to be separated by a wall he wants to build. I know we go to places we never expected. Of course, we always come back to walls.

It's a long trip - he's in the luxury RV with his staff (the father of one of his staffers supplied the Holiday Rambler and does the driving). I'm in the car trailing, along with News photographer Ellen Jaskol and, at times, a reporter from London. Meanwhile, there are doughnuts in the RV, Mapquest on the laptop and 609 miles to go before we rest.

9 a.m. Phoenix. The Coyote Lakes Recreation Club.

We walk in past the cactus guarding the entrance, just so you know it's Arizona. Tancredo is drinking decaf Starbucks. An aide had penciled in "Tom" and a happy face on the cup.

The crowd is trending - how can I put this delicately? - old. This would hold true at each stop. Though it's hardly surprising to find retirees in Arizona, it's a little strange that we keep bumping into retirees from, say, Illinois who were apparently shocked to discover all the gardeners here speak Spanish. Wasn't that somewhere in the brochure?

In the Arizona segment of our road trip, there are at least two common themes - the crowds love Tancredo and they don't love McCain. As Arizona Republican Rob Haney puts it, "McCain should change the name of the Straight Talk Express to the Crooked Talk Express."

"I want you to call your senators," Tancredo says to those assembled. "It may be a waste of time to call one of them. But, hey, it's only a phone call."

11:41 a.m. Phoenix. State Capitol.

Tancredo is giving a brief speech to the Arizona Senate. If you're planning to make a tour of statehouses, you can skip this one. The wood paneling looks like something out of a 1950s split-level den, although, to be fair, the chairs are a little plusher.

Tancredo would make a stop at the cafeteria and then at Rep. Russell Pearce's office, where there's not one, but two large paintings of John Wayne. Pearce is a leader in the state's anti-immigration movement. Arizona has already passed Prop 200, which denies every basic right that it can to illegal immigrants. It's similar to an initiative on its way to your Colorado ballot.

The vote is over in Arizona - but not, apparently, the war.

The big story is outside on the Capitol lawn, where dueling groups of activists await Tancredo and company. The dueling crowds bring dueling signs that mostly say, to paraphrase Stephen Stills, hooray for our side.

"America not Amexico."

"Walls Will Not Fix Our Broken Immigration System."

One of the speakers is Michelle Dallacroce, who heads a group called Mothers Against Illegal Aliens.

When I introduce myself as a reporter from Colorado, she asks if I know John Denver. You can't make this stuff up.

Dallacroce begins to speak, and the protesters begin to, well, protest.

"As mothers, we fight to protect our children, and we will fight to protect our country," Dallacroce says. "We don't want to send our children into an America that has been mutated beyond recognition by massive illegal immigration."

"You don't speak for this mother!" a protester shouts.

Tancredo is doing a news conference, with activists from both side pressing in. Nearby, the Holiday Rambler RV, with the Secure America Now sign on the side, is warming up. It feels like an oversized getaway car.

4:15 p.m. Snedigar Park sports complex in a southeast suburb of Phoenix.

This is what a presidential tour looks like. Bay Buchanan, Pat Buchanan's sister, is pushing Tancredo to make a run on the immigration issue. She's running a political action committee called Team America - which, I'm guessing, Tancredo did not take from the movie by the creators of South Park. Tancredo, age 60, and on this trip looking his age, must be wondering what he's getting into.

The wind is blowing. The Arizona weather has turned bad by Arizona standards. We're standing in a dirt parking lot, across from a baseball field, and the wind makes it look like Wrigley Field has been transferred to the Sahara.

Somebody has the idea to move the crowd of maybe 20, most of them Minutemen and Minutewomen, behind the RV to block the wind.

Don Goldwater, nephew of the legendary Barry Goldwater, gets off the RV. He is running for governor and has latched on to the Tancredo tour for a day. Bay Buchanan is trying to keep the dust out of her contacts. A Buchanan aide is getting ready to pass around a large plastic container, which doubles as collection plate. Tancredo's tie is flying, although his hair stays put.

Goldwater vows that if the federal government doesn't put in a fence, that Arizona will. He says he'd like to take "our illegal alien friends" and make them do the building. I can still hear the sneer on the word friends.

After Tancredo speaks, I go into the crowd, where people call Tancredo a hero, and bump into Alan Swanson, a Minuteman who offers up one long sneer: "We're losing our country. It's very simple. These people are breeding like rats. They crawling in like a cancer everywhere in the country. You can't go to a restaurant, a hotel, a Wal-Mart, anywhere without hearing Spanish."

Now I'm looking for the getaway car.

7:10 p.m. Mesa Community College.

Tancredo's speech here sets up multiple themes, starting with the remittances that Mexican workers send home. "And God love them. They take the jobs - I hear all the time - that no American would take. Certainly they're low-paying jobs. And they send $20 billion a year to Mexico alone."

Mexico, he says, is hooked on remittances in the same way, he says, American business is hooked on cheap labor.

He talks about drugs coming over the border and Mexicans coming over the border to depress wages. We hear about crowded schools and crowded emergency rooms.

Incursions are a hot topic. Is the Mexican army paid off by drug dealers? You saw the drug-dealer tunnel on the news or in the papers. And the video of the truck loaded with marijuana, stuck in the Rio Grande, with the U.S. Border Patrol watching.

In fact, I hear everything from Tancredo except the cultural issue - which is what started him on this. Remember when everyone was talking about bilingual education?

That has been replaced, in every speech, by Sept. 11 and terrorism.

He says, "9/11 has given people freedom to talk about this subject."

It's not completely free. After each speech, they pass a plastic container/collection plate.

8:15 a.m. Tucson. Hotel Arizona.

It's a fundraising breakfast for a congressman. I know this because the sign says "Send a Minuteman to Congress."

At each stop, Tancredo speaks and then introduces Buchanan - "star of stage and screen."

Like her brother Pat, she's an insurgent. You remember Pat Buchanan's campaign against Bush Sr. Bay was the campaign manager. Now, it's Tancredo, who is not - let me just put myself on the record - ever going to win a New Hampshire primary. He's the best she can get. And she's exactly what he needs.

She's known in Washington, she says, "as the kinder and gentler Buchanan." There may be some question about that.

She's master of the sound bite. Tancredo says the president called the Minutemen vigilantes and Tancredo calls them heroes. Buchanan calls them heroes with lawn chairs, binoculars and oxygen tanks.

She gives a brief speech ripping the president on immigration.

"Tom was quoted in the papers saying, 'Finally, the president is speaking and . . . and he's coming around. And I called Tom and said, 'What the . . . are you talking about? Did you see the rest of what he's saying? He said he can't enforce the law until he has a guest worker plan. And Tom says, 'He said that?' I said, 'Yes, Tom. After all these years you'd think you'd learn.' "

Tancredo, standing beside her, says, "I wanted to concentrate on the good." He gets his laugh.

On the RV with Team Tancredo, heading to Willcox, Ariz.

The first thing I ask Tancredo is if he has changed now that he's chummy with the Republican establishment.

"It's pretty weird," he says. "It's very strange for me. I start worrying when I'm in the mainstream. I've gotta find something else."

He thinks.

"Legalize pot," he tries.

There was talk the Republicans would come up with an immigration bill. Tancredo just never thought it could be one he'd possibly endorse.

But then he was at a House Republican conference, and the leadership started asking him what he thought. It was one of those look- over-your-shoulder, you-mean-me? moments.

"I'm saying we can't have a guest worker on this bill, and (Rep. David)Dreier says, "you don't want guest worker in there?"

Tancredo laughs.

"First of all, they're asking me.

"No. 2. What the hell kind of question is that?"

Now he's really laughing.

"Don't they watch your speeches on C-SPAN?" I ask.

"I know I sent him a packet."

Tancredo is tired, but he admits to feeding off the cheers. And then we start to argue about immigration. I ask what separates this anti- immigration movement from all the others that have preceded it. Not much, he says. Except that this time, he says, they've got it right.

But as he talks, you start to hear that, for Tancredo, it's only partly about immigration.

This is his world view. He thinks America is on the brink of ruin - and that illegal immigration is just one more symptom.

He tells the story of asking students if they thought America was the greatest country in the world.

"Four tentatively raise their hands," he says. "Just four. Oh, and three teachers."

He laughs, but he's serious.

"We're doing this to ourselves. It's only exacerbated by mass immigration, by people who come here and don't want to assimilate, who don't want to be citizens. Why should someone want to be an American if nobody gives a s--- anyway?"

I tell him that, for me, the problem is that you hear rhetoric of going after businesses, but all you ever see is Minutemen going to the borders. All I see is Mexicans lured here with the promise of jobs and then told they have to live underground, if they make it across the desert, if they're not raped or robbed by coyotes.

He then offers this: "You should be on my side. We're both the little people. I mean, in this battle, I'm truly not the big guy."

He says it like he means it.

11:45 a.m. Willcox. Keiller Park Pavilion.

We'll be brief. Nine people show up. And four cops.

Back on the bus, but only briefly, on the way to Deming, N.M.

I want to talk more to Tancredo. Bay Buchanan is nervous. I'm known as a Tancredo critic. Tancredo is getting tired. There are risks.

Tancredo tells me cheerfully, "If you write something terrible about me, I'll be able to use it."

The conversation takes an unexpected turn. Tancredo asks me about a relative of mine who just died. And then he is talking about his 92-year-old mother, Adeline, who is lying in a Denver hospice and how he prayed during his last visit for her to go peacefully.

His mom worked at a Denver department store for 45 years. His dad, who died a few years ago, worked for a meat packer and then he drove a truck.

Tancredo pauses.

"But he was an alcoholic," he says.

His brothers were much older. When they left home, it was him and his mom and his father's drinking.

"Those were not good days," he says.

The people on the bus are reading or listening to music. Tancredo has gone to a different place.

"I don't remember them as being happy. Like, it's your high school reunion and they call and ask you to go. I said no, because I don't have any memories that are good memories. It has nothing to do with high school or the people in it.

"I suffered from depression. I was treated for it. It was not a good time. It wasn't a good time because of what was happening in my home."

We have been on the road for two days, talking about immigration. But it's become clear what's really been on his mind.

"My father died a few years ago. The hardest thing for me, trying to analyze your emotions: How do you feel? He was an episodic drunk. Every Christmas, I'd read Christmas poems to children. I did it every year. And they said, 'We want you to talk about your Christmas memories.' 'I don't think you do.'

" 'OK,' I said. 'All right. I will.' "

Bay Buchanan has come over. "Oh, no," she says, hearing the story.

He says, "'Look, I have to tell everyone listening, when you get drunk and you raise hell and beat people up and things like that, you may think on the next day you can make it all OK and sober up and make everyone happy and take 'em to dinner and see a show and be really nice for a long period of time. You know what: It never works. It doesn't erase the memories. That memory overshadows all the good things."

His parents stayed together all those years. His mother, you don't have to be a psychologist to understand, stayed with her husband as he abused his child.

"So, you know," he says, "I know that in my life there were many happy days. I just can't think of them. They're not available to me - only the bad memories."

Buchanan tries to steer the conversation. She talks about stopping for lunch. She wants to know if Tancredo is through with the interview.

I tell him of a family member who has struggled with alcohol. He turns to me: "That was the hardest thing when he passed, dealing with the emotions you know you should have - but you don't. And they're there. They've got to be there. I mean, they're down there, somewhere. You dig for them. But you've blocked them off. They're blocked- off emotions."

The RV stops. I get off. The tour resumes.

2:45 p.m. Deming. Food Basket parking lot.

A man is standing on the back of a flatbed truck, doing warmup for Tancredo.

A reporter from a London newspaper has come to observe the Tancredo phenomenon. She has read the stories. She whispers, "Shouldn't the crowd be larger?"

I'm wondering the same thing.

Tancredo doesn't get on the truck. He gets on a stool that is used to board the RV. He says - and it sounds like he's trying to give himself a pep talk - "I'm going to do it as long as I have a voice and as long as anyone will listen."

4:30 p.m. Las Cruces, N.M. Good Samaritan Auditorium.

There are two TV trucks outside. For Tancredo, the trip is all about talk radio (he's done 4 1/2 hours) and local TV.

In back of the hall, a reporter is doing a live shot as Tancredo speaks before maybe 50 people. Tancredo is telling a story about an Iranian who crossed the border nearby - only to knock on a border patrolman's door. The reporter keeps talking.

7:30 p.m. Alamogordo, N.M. Willie Estrada Civic Center.

On the ride here, the call comes that his mother is dying. Tancredo is on the phone trying to get a plane to Denver. He cancels the trip to Reno. But he doesn't cancel the night's speech. It's the biggest crowd of the day.

Tancredo had seemed flat. Now the emotion takes over, and he gives his strongest speech. There are conspiracies, he says, of countries who want the borders open and businesses who want the borders open and Democrats who want the borders open.

And I think of Micaela Cadena, a student, from the stop before.

"I don't like the broad language that this is what America wants; this is what America needs," she says. "I think he strikes a note with people who are uninformed."

Postscript.

It's a 3 1/2-hour drive that night to Albuquerque. The next morning, Tancredo flies home. His mother dies three days later.

On the day she dies, his Washington office puts out a news release about hostilities on the border. Tancredo is quoted as calling for the U.S. to "deploy military personnel to defend our borders against the Mexican military."

It sounds like the Mexican invasion, only with real soldiers. The wheels keep turning, even if the RV is headed back to Texas.

You couldn't help but feel bad for Tancredo - bad that his mother died and bad that his emotions are so scrambled and bad that he can't take one day from grandstanding.

And then you listen to his message.

Wall off the problem.

Keep down the demons.

Shout down those who have no voice.

And I'm thinking: And if you do get heard, then you're surprised.

Maybe if you believed someone was going to pay attention, you might have thought harder about what it was you were going to say.

littwinm@RockyMountainNews.com

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