OUR VIEW: Tancredo wipes out conservative hopes (vote)

Don’t expect a conservative win at the top in Colorado. The GOP has imploded under a gubernatorial primary contest that keeps getting worse. Monday, it devolved into a clown show that calls into question the ability of legendary GOP Chairman Dick Wadhams to continue managing the party.

Trouble began for Republicans when Scott McInnis, considered the likely GOP nominee, was caught in a plagiarism scandal from which he cannot recover. He took $300,000 for a handful of essays, several of which contained large passages stolen from a Colorado Supreme Court judge. When caught, McInnis threw a respected water expert — a senior citizen who was paid a pittance to help with McInnis’ big-money assignment — under the bus. Then he had the gall to say voters don’t care about plagiarism.

His challenger, Dan Maes, is unknown to most, has never held public office and has a campaign finance controversy.

Maes or McInnis has a better chance of winning Powerball than beating popular Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, the likely Democratic nominee who enjoys bipartisan support.

The moment it couldn’t get worse, former U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo announced Monday he would save the day as the Constitution Party candidate. Tancredo, who did great running Colorado’s libertarian Independence Institute in the early ’90s, had a promising political career. Then he started going off the rails on a crazy train, as Ozzy Osbourne would say. He has devolved into a publicity seeker who pimps immigration hysteria and advocates big-government solutions that would result in policies more destructive than the drug war. As a gubernatorial candidate, he will obsess about these issues: 1. immigration; 2. immigration; and 3. immigration. If asked about the economy and jobs, he will quickly blame an immigrant and her “anchor baby” — his dehumanizing term to demonize infant citizens he deems unworthy of common decency. Like Denver radio host Peter Boyles, Tancredo speaks of only one topic.

The GOP tragicomedy culminated Monday when Tancredo, Boyles and Wadhams indulged a two-against-one shouting match on Boyles’ show. Tancredo said Wadhams called McInnis and Maes “jokers,” who could not be trusted, in private discussions. After Wadhams denied it, Boyles confided that Wadhams had made identical comments to him in private.

If Tancredo believes he’s the answer to candidates with integrity issues, there’s the matter of a memo he wrote in December for tea partiers . Though he became a third-party candidate Monday, he told them to avoid such candidates.

“Some patriots are tempted to launch a third political party or back one of the existing small parties,” Tancredo wrote. “I strongly believe that such a course is suicidal and would only result in splitting the conservative vote and guaranteeing the re-election of liberals and socialists.”

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So there we have it. Tancredo took action Monday to ensure the election of liberals and socialists — in his own words. That’s big of you, Tom.

Hickenlooper should thank his guardian angels. Mere-mortal operatives, in an infiltration of the GOP, could not have so thoroughly destroyed the party’s hopes for November.

— Wayne Laugesen , editorial page editor, for the editorial board. Friend him on Facebook