Tom Tancredo clearly doesn't know that Joel Stein's singular role at the LA Times is to be a wise-ass columnist - if he did, he'd never have agreed to sit down to lunch with the man. Personally, I blame Tancredo's staff.
At any rate, it results in a couple of good lines in
Stein's piece.- Inever thought GOP presidential candidate Tom Tancredo would eat Mexican food with me. The Colorado congressman has proposed anti-immigration legislation so draconian that he's been banned from the White House and called a "nut" by Jeb Bush. And I definitely never thought Tancredo would tell me that Mexican is his favorite cuisine. That was like finding out that CNN's Nancy Grace gets turned on by violent criminals. Only surprising.
Tancredo agreed to our Mexican lunch during a campaign sweep through Iowa last month. But the night before our appointment, I found out he was already headed to Mami's Authentic Mexican Food in Muscatine for dinner. The man was planning two Mexican meals in a row. I had little to teach him.
On my way to Mami's, however, I got a call from his aide. A local Republican had tipped Tancredo off to the fact that Mami's owners marched in the Great American Boycott on May Day 2006. So Tancredo was now driving all the way to Davenport to go to Carlos O'Kelly's Mexican Cafe instead. If his campaign staff was as skilled at finding voters as Mexican restaurants in Iowa, Tancredo would win the nomination.
Carlos O'Kelly's makes the finest Mexican food with an Irish flair of any chain restaurant in Iowa. The enchiladas came with a sort of hollandaise sauce that constituted a greater insult to Mexicans than anything Tancredo has ever said.
I thought the name of this place was a joke, but apparently there actually is such a
chain, located primarily in the Midwest. NotBob? Are these guys a client together with Piggly Wiggly?
Gattigap
