ACP candidate Goss steps aside for Tancredo; calls Maes ‘hapless’

Big Ben Goss, American Constitutional Party candidate for governor, has stepped aside so that former Republican Congressman and anti-illegal immigration firebrand Tom Tancredo can run in his place. Tancredo is seeking to offer conservative voters an alternative to the struggling candidacies of Dan Maes and Scott McInnis.

Goss talked to the Colorado Statesman Monday. Like state GOP chief Dick Wadhams, Goss thinks little of the grassroots candidacy of GOP frontrunner and tea party favorite Dan Maes: “I think Maes is hapless… if he wins [the GOP primary], he’ll look like a third party candidate [in the general election].” So much for the year of the tea party!

Tancredo’s political celebrity will draw voters to his American Constitution Party candidacy. The platform of the American Constitution Party will not. It’s an extreme agenda based around Christian right religious beliefs.

It begins:

We, the members of the American Constitution Party, gratefully acknowledge the blessings of the Lord God as theCreator, Preserver, and Ruler of the universe and of our nation. We hereby appeal to Him for aid, comfort, guidance, and the protection of His Divine Providence as we work to restore and preserve this nation as a government of, by, and for the people.

It spirals from there into an anti-abortion and anti-gay screed.

Abortion
The pre-born child, whose life begins at conception, is from that moment fully a human being created in God’s image. The first duty of the law is to prevent the taking of innocent human life. It is, therefore, the duty of all civil governments to secure and safeguard the lives of the pre-born.

AIDS
Under no circumstances should government continue to subsidize activities that have the effect of encouraging perverted or promiscuous sexual conduct. In the name of “safe sex”, millions of tax dollars have been misdirected to organizations that contribute to the spread of AIDS by endorsing (implicitly or explicitly) perverse, immoral, and unhealthy sexual conduct.

Here’s Denver Post columnist Chuck Plunkett’s take:

The ACP platform calls for ending the Voting Rights Act of 1965, a key Civil Rights reform that outlawed restrictions or impediments to voters based on color or race.

Now that’s a real conversation starter.

The ACP would return all federal land, bar women from serving in the military, end compulsory school attendance, retake the Panama Canal, preclude membership with multinational groups like the United Nations, stop domestic federal aid and so on and so forth.

Goss told the Statesman he was sure there would be “a significant flow of independent voters as well as the more conservatively minded GOP and Democrats going for a Tancredo ticket.”

“The nice thing, if you want to call it that, about Colorado politics is that you only need a simple plurality, you don’t need a majority. Because this is an anti-incumbent year, I could see Tancredo winning with even possibly less than 30 percent.”

[Photo of Ben Goss via the ACP website ]

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