The Flag-Bearer

Examining Tancredo's life in the same way exposes a slew of contradictions, not the least of which is his own background as a member of an immigrant group. In his June 9 speech, he mentioned the tough row his Italian grandparents had to hoe after coming to this country; he also notes that the circumstances under which he was raised in an ethnically rich neighborhood near 44th and Lowell were entirely free of silver spoons. His father worked at the local Armour meatpacking plant until it closed, then earned a paycheck driving trucks (an Alzheimer's sufferer at 93, he's cared for at a Wheat Ridge nursing home), and his mother toiled as a clerk at a Joslins department store for 45 years (she's 90 and lives in Arvada). Mama Tancredo risked her life to bring little Tommy into the world. She bore two sons, but a third child died, and doctors told her not to try again -- advice she ignored.

Discrimination wasn't the most prominent feature of Tancredo's youth, but he got to taste it every so often. When he was about to enter Northeastern Junior College in Sterling, "I went to see the dean to get a room assignment," he remembers. "He gets out this two-by-five card and says, 'Well, there's a problem. You're Catholic, and we have a quota on Catholics, Negroes and Jews in student housing, and we're already over.'" Consequently, Tancredo spent his two years at Northeastern living in a motel.

Of such experiences are liberals commonly made, but not when it came to Tancredo. He didn't inherit conservatism from his parents; his dad voted for Democrats because Franklin Roosevelt saved the country from the Depression, and his mom went with Republicans because Dwight Eisenhower ended the war in Korea. Other than that, "they were apolitical," Tancredo says. He was, too, until it suddenly dawned on him, while attending Holy Family Catholic High School in 1960, that the right wing was the best wing for him. The timing of this discovery was inconvenient, seeing as how Richard Nixon, a man who generally represented Tancredo's beliefs, was running for president against John F. Kennedy, a Catholic.

"We had a mock election, and the vote for Kennedy was 92-2," Tancredo remembers. After a laugh, he says, "I never found out who the other vote for Nixon was. Maybe he didn't want anyone else to know."

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For Tancredo, masking his own values is anathema, and his outspokenness about immigration hasn't made him many chums south of the border. "The Mexican press is very aggressive," he notes. "They're always saying, 'How can you hate Mexico?' And I say, 'Look, I'm full-blooded Italian. And the fact is, you are like Italians in so many ways. You are a gregarious people, a bighearted people, hardworking people -- and you're short. I love you! I love this country!'"

His claims haven't won over the Mexican media, and their peers in Colorado have their doubts, too. In the wake of reports last summer about Jesus Apodaca, a Mexico-born honor student whose lack of documentation the congressman brought to the attention of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News began a blitz of mostly disapproving coverage; Tancredo says articles or columns about him appeared on "something like 38 out of 39 days. One day I called a friend of mine, and he said, 'Hang on just a minute. I have to get finished reading the Tancredo section.'"

True enough, News columnist Mike Littwin and Post counterpart Diane Carman got in lots of licks on Tancredo, and while new Post columnist Jim Spencer has been in Colorado for only a matter of months, he already understands that knocking Tancredo is good sport. As part of a column about parking enforcement, he jokingly proposed "Tancredo Day," on which "all native-born Americans (excluding actual Native Americans, of course) park for free.... Meanwhile, immigrants, including naturalized citizens, pay double. Folks with an ID card issued by any Spanish-speaking country get a Denver Boot no matter where they put their vehicles."

Still, these slaps can't compare with the invective from many Latino columnists, politicians and opinion-makers. Typical is a May column written for La Raza Newspapers by Sal Osio, president of HispanicVista.com, that bears the vivid headline "Rep. Tancredo: Patriot, Idiot or Just Plain Racist?" Osio picks the latter option: "If one examines the congressman's record, his statements and conduct, the only reasonable conclusion one reaches is that he is a lucid but fanatic racist."