WASHINGTON — As night settles over the Capitol, Tom Tancredo is seated in his congressional office, smoking a fat cigar and nursing a plastic tumbler of scotch.
The president is unhappy with him, the Colorado Republican says. So are GOP House leaders. One congressman, a California Republican who wants Tancredo run out of the party, is badmouthing him all over town. Tancredo exhales a billow of blue smoke.
Life is good.
With Congress weighing the toughest border security bill in years, the four-term House member from suburban Denver has emerged as the GOP's most prominent voice on immigration -- the one "to place our goal posts," as he puts it.
He has done so with a blow-torch persona and uncompromising stance that pays no mind to party labels or diplomatic niceties, international or otherwise. His forum is talk radio, the political press and the food-fight shows on cable TV, which feast on each deliciously provocative morsel:
President Bush is a hypocrite on border issues. Republicans shill for big business. If Islamic terrorists attack the U.S. with nuclear weapons, we should bomb Mecca.
To critics, Tancredo is a hatemonger and mean-spirited demagogue. To supporters, he is a rare politician with the spine to speak his mind (and theirs as well). Either way, his talk of militarizing the border and hunting down and deporting millions of illegal immigrants has complicated White House efforts to put a friendlier face on the GOP and court Latino votes. That explains why so many of Tancredo's enemies are fellow Republicans.
"Party I couldn't care less about," he says. "If it gets hurt by this, it deserves to be hurt."
Tancredo -- pronounced Tan-CRAY-dough \o7--\f7 is even pondering a run for president in 2008. Not to win -- he doesn't kid himself -- but to put illegal immigration front and center, even if that drives a wedge further in the GOP.
"There are times when being in the minority looks better to me," he says. "You can certainly be closer to your own principles. Maybe that's what this party needs is to get kicked in the butt."
So far Tancredo has traveled to Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina -- three early voting states -- imploring voters to press each presidential candidate on immigration and "not let them equivocate."
Last month, in another bit of heresy, he campaigned for independent Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minuteman freelance border patrol, in his unsuccessful congressional run against Orange County Republican John Campbell.
