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Opinion: Last-minute Rocky Mountain Hi: Sarah Palin endorses third party Tom Tancredo for Colorado governor

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For all its clean air and blue skies, Colorado has been a weirdly messy place politically this year.

There was former President Bill Clinton allegedly offering yet another Democratic Senate candidate a job working for the Obama administration if he left the competition. He didn’t and lost anyway.

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Then Republican ex-Rep. Tom Tancredo, he of the spectacularly unsuccessful bid for the GOP presidential nomination, jumps into the governor’s race as a third-party American Constitution candidate.

And now on the last day ex-Gov. Sarah Palin endorses Tancredo against the hopelessly trailing....

...Republican, Dan Maes, and Democrat John Hickenlooper. If you were following the World Series, that’s 7 to 4 to 5 to 1. In a campaign robocall that started going out to Colorado voters Monday afternoon, Palin says, ‘Tom is the right man for the job and he’ll fight for lower taxes.’ Then she adds, about his trademark issue, ‘And we know he’ll continue to work to end illegal immigration.’

It’s actually not a bad political move for Tancredo and Palin. With no GOP damage since Maes is a non-factor, she solidifies her anti-establishment, go-with-the-common-sense-conservative-guy-no-matter-what stance. Palin’s pal and Tancredo’s former House colleague Michele Bachmann made the same move earlier. If Tancredo wins, it looks like he’d owe her, if Palin were to run for something else someday soon.

And since Tancredo wasn’t getting any significant Democratic support anyway, the arrival of Palin’s endorsement costs him nothing and might help among Colorado’s conservatives, where she is a favorite and he must score very big to have a chance in this three-way tilt.

Later Monday Palin gave this explanation to Neil Cavuto on Fox Business Network (Video below):

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I have never been so obsessively partisan as to let the politics of partisanship get in the way of doing what’s right. I relate to those independents who are within this Tea Party movement who are saying enough is enough. The American public, we are taxed enough already, we want common sense solutions, we want time tested solutions to be applied to get this economy back on track. They believe in smaller, smarter government, so do I.

-- Andrew Malcolm

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