Saturday, February 2, 2008

Where's Tom Tancredo?

Over at Brave New World Watch, John Savage poses a question that has also occurred to me lately, what happened to Tom Tancredo?

John writes:

By the way, where has Tancredo been ever since he dropped out of the race? You’d think he’d be making his case for Romney, but I haven’t even seen him mentioned anywhere.

That's a very good and a timely question which I thought warranted a blog post of its own here at Webster's, obviously. Interestingly enough, when I did a search for the "press release of Tom Tancredo's withdrawal from Presidential race," or something like that, I found this story from the San Jose Mercury News, which concludes this way:

Dennis Goldford, a political science professor at Drake University in Des Moines, said Tancredo forced his GOP rivals to talk about immigration.

"What Tancredo has done is analogous to what a third-party candidate does," Goldford said. "They call attention to and articulate an issue that the other two main parties neglect or don't see" and then after forcing the issue they disappear. (emphasis mine)

They disappear indeed. In the case of Congressman Tancredo, whose actions are analogous to only in the sense that he was not a third party candidate, this statement is quite accurate, not to mention somewhat prophetic given that it was made at the time of Tancredo's withdrawal from the race way before there was any indication that Tancredo had "disappeared" from the scene altogether. Many of us, including myself, expected Tancredo to move to the sidelines after his withdrawal from the Presidential race, where we'd still hear from him on occasion, not entirely out of the arena. But none of us has seen or heard anything from Tancredo, not even a peep, since he left the race and endorsed Romney, which seems kind of odd. I ask again:

Where's Tom Tancredo? And why isn't he, as John says, making his case for Romney at this critical hour?

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