I have a hard time believing the 212,805 people in the 6th Congressional District who voted for Tom Tancredo in 2004 are happy with the job he’s doing.
Maybe I’m wrong.
Perhaps those constituents want someone who can’t even work with people of his own party on a compromise immigration bill.
Maybe they enjoy the negative publicity Colorado gets when Tancredo says things like America should “take out” Muslim holy sites in retaliation for the terrorist attacks of Islamic fundamentalists.
They might like that he pals around with those gun-toting vigilantes who disgrace the name of the real minutemen.
Perhaps they agree with Tancredo when he voted in Congress against appropriating aid to Hurricane Katrina survivors or to extend authorization of the Voting Rights Act.
I bet many of them are sick of Tancredoism, but want to make sure no bleeding-heart liberal takes his place.
His challenger, Bill Winter of Castle Rock, is the antidote.
Haven’t heard of him yet? You will.
Winter, a 42-year-old attorney, is a “Fighting Dem” – one of about 30 veteran Democrats running for Congress this year.
He served in the Marines and later in the Navy. He worked on Sen. John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign and in 2005 served as president of Be The Change USA, a grassroots progressive political organization based in Colorado.
Looking at numbers from a poll his campaign commissioned in May, it’s clear that Winter has a chance of winning. Asked if they would vote for Tancredo or someone new, 44 percent of those polled said they’d vote for Tancredo, and 42 percent said they’d vote for someone new. (Fourteen percent said they don’t know how they’d vote.)
And that was before Winter’s campaign took off.
He’s no knee-jerk liberal, as evidenced by a speech he recently gave to members of the conservative Parker Breakfast Club.
“It seems to me that if you consider yourself a conservative in America today, you have to wonder what happened to conservatism. Barry Goldwater wouldn’t recognize it anymore.
“Conservative used to mean fiscal responsibility. Conservative used to mean a limited government. Conservative used to mean keeping the government out of our private lives.
“Conservative used to mean a strong but limited foreign policy that didn’t have us policemen for the whole world. Conservative used to mean state and local control of things like education.
“But that’s all gone in the last six years. Now we have the largest deficits in the history of America. Now we have the largest most intrusive federal government in the history of America.
“Now we have a government that wants to tell us who we can associate with in the privacy of our own homes and how we should pray and what our faith should look like.
“Now we have a foreign policy that says it’s our job to fix every problem we see in the world. Now we have a foreign policy based on nation building.
“Now we have a federal education policy that has Washington, D.C., telling us how to run our schools. Folks, we have five of the best school districts in America right here in (our congressional district) by any measurement. We don’t need the federal government telling us how to run our schools.”
There’s a lot more to Winter, which I will get into in future columns. I plan to explore the district to find out what voters really want. I have a hard time believing they want another two years of Tancredoism.
Cindy Rodríguez’s column appears Tuesdays and Sundays. Contact her at 303-954-1211 or crodriguez@denverpost.com.
