Tanc Commander

Forget red. Forget blue. This campaign is all white, baby. Just imagine what kind of coded and decoded messages are about to start spouting from Tom Tancredo’s presidential campaign. Dave at Orcinus explains some of the moving parts:

It’s not hard to see why no one inside the Beltway takes Tom Tancredo’s campaign for the presidency very seriously. After all, he is a one-issue candidate — immigration, which he euphemistically describes as “securing America’s borders” — and he’s a certifiable nutcase. And it’s true that he is, in the end, an unelectable extremist.

But before 2008 is out, I’m fairly confident that Tancredo will have made his mark on the race for the presidency — as well as on the GOP and, for that matter, on the nation generally. And it won’t have been for the better, except to the extent that he will divide and weaken the GOP, which is considerable.

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Now, it’s nearly a certainty that Tancredo can’t actually win the Republican nomination, since he really is being a Tommy One Note. But his campaign’s appeal to the ugly nativist sentiment circulating and bubbling upward in the Republican cauldron — particularly in rural portions of the Midwest and West, whose demographics have been rapidly changing with the influx of Latino workers in the past decade — will probably have more traction, at least initially, than anyone inside the Beltway suspects.

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One can readily imagine a Republican party split between its paleoconservative faction, including the religious right, and its corporatist conservative faction, which runs the show inside the Beltway. It won’t be pretty, and it’s certain to boost Democratic prospects.

On the other hand, Tancredo’s campaign will also give real traction to the ugly nativist impulse that is bubbling up through the conservative movement — and that, in the end is bad news for everyone.

As with certain other hardcore rightwing causes, the public is generally out ahead on the issue of race and generally trending in the right direction (that is, younger generations seem increasingly tolerant). But there are enough fearmongers (and a big enough market of fearful bigots) to keep this problem churning indefinitely. Sure “no one takes this seriously.” But it’s another melody in a grand symphony of division. It will be disheartening, to say the least, if we see a new hate-issue candidate in every election, particularly if the media use these campaigns to “examine issues,” which rarely means accurately portraying social progress or — perish the thought — addressing the essential absence of humanity in such policies. May Tom’s candidacy get all the support it deserves.

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