GOP Lawmaker Relishes Role as a Flamethrower

"If the president were going to call six to 10 people and lock them in a room and say, 'Solve this problem,' my guess is Tom would not be on the list," said Walt Klein, a longtime Colorado campaign strategist and friend of Tancredo. "But my guess is by the time they got to the meeting, they'd be fully aware of what Tom Tancredo has been saying for the last two, three years."

At 60, Tancredo has a contrary streak that is nearly a lifetime long. As a boy, he watched old-time Westerns and rooted for the Indians. (He can't remember why.) In 1960, he supported Richard M. Nixon over John F. Kennedy, pitting him against the nuns at his Catholic high school and all but one other student in a 90-2 straw vote.

Tancredo was teaching junior high civics in Denver when he first ran for public office as a way to encourage student involvement. It was 1976 and, after Watergate, Republicans were desperate for warm bodies. Tancredo campaigned for the state House as a reformer, listing the family spaghetti recipe on one side of his brochures and his "good government" recipe on the other.

Once elected, Tancredo soon fell in with a group of like-minded conservatives, known as "the House crazies" for their unbending philosophy and guerrilla tactics. He left the Legislature in 1981 to head the regional Education Department office, then led the Independence Institute, a libertarian think tank in Golden, Colo. He is fondly remembered for his irreverence -- on his door was a sign: "Will Think for Food."

Even now, for all his combustible rhetoric, Tancredo appears a man of good cheer and little pretense. He discounts himself as "too fat, too short and too bald" to be president.

Speaking at Newport Beach's posh Balboa Bay Club, he recounted a trip to Target to buy emergency underwear after his luggage was lost. In a CNN interview on immigration legislation, he unfurled a long, winding metaphor about "a mail-order bride" and her "bad seed" baby when, abruptly, he stopped and laughed at the verbal mess he'd made.

In 1998, Tancredo emerged from a crowded field to win an open House seat. He has been easily reelected despite having promised to quit after three terms because, he says, his work on immigration is so vital.

The broken vow was all the more brazen given Tancredo's leadership in the Colorado term-limits movement, which was enraged by his turnabout.

"I am sorry I let them down, because I did," he said of his old allies. "I would feel the same way if I were them."