Backs Romney as Best of Top Candidates
Rep. Tom Tancredo dropped out of the Republican presidential
nomination contest Thursday and announced that he would support former
Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, a decision that surprised some of his
supporters and other observers.
Tancredo was the first candidate to campaign in South Carolina and has been the champion campaigner that brought the subject of illegal immigration to the presidential debates.
Many of Tancredo’s early supporters switched over to Rep. Ron Paul who appealed to them on other issues, and was fairly strong in opposition to illegal immigration.
Tancredo’s advisers included Bay Buchanan the sister of Pat Buchanan. “We looked at this race and determined there are a number of candidates who are abysmal on the immigration issue,” Bay Buchanan told World Net daily. “We have championed the issue of border security and the last thing we wanted to do was support a pro-amnesty candidate,” she concluded.
They picked four candidates they thought had a chance to win the Iowa Caucus and go on to get the nomination. They were Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani.
“After studying the immigration policy statements of these four, we decided three were so awful they were really on the other side,” she said.
They looked at Huckabee’s record in Arkansas and found it to be as bad as the proposals by Giuliani and McCain.
They met with Romney and decided that he had the best plan. Tancredo’s support of Romney counters the support that Huckabee is getting from Jim Gilchrist. The Gilchrest endorsement of Huckabee has split the Minuteman movement.
The Tancredo endorsement of Romney could be sufficient to pull Romney ahead in South Carolina where Huckabee is currently in the lead with less than four weeks remaining before the First in the South Primary in the Palmetto State.
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