Single Issue Candidates

Kevin Drum republishes bits of an interview with Tom Tancredo showing that Tancredo sees himself as playing a political role that has nothing to do with being elected president, and everything to do with acting as an extremist pole that can help pull the center of the immigration debate far to the right. Kevin wonders why liberals don't do this, and concludes "the answer is talk radio. Our extremists don't succeed in redefining the playing field because there's no institutional infrastructure behind them that converts lunacy into political pressure."

I'm not sure that's true. Forgetting for a moment that the blogs now serve a pretty similar purpose, Tancredo has not been engaged in an organizing effort. His presidential campaign is not about using talk radio to create a standalone movement capable of pressuring the Republican Party. Rather, he's using the structure of the primary season as his "institutional infrastructure" to force concessions from the presidential candidates. A Democrat could easily do that.

One of my real hopes for this election was that John Kitzhaber, the former governor of Oregon, would mount a single issue candidacy on health care. He's a former ER doctor with a Brian Schweitzer-like Western charm, and his whole focus is now on federal health reform. For whatever reason, he didn't take the bait, though there was a fair amount of pressure on him to do so. Luckily, Edwards, to some degree, stepped into that role, even if he didn't do it in a single-issue way. But this stuff works just fine on the Democratic side.