Organizers of the National Tea Party Convention, who have been at pains to present their confab as a gathering of patriotic and mainstream Americans, may not have been pleased by the speech given by their opening-night speaker.
Former congressman Tom Tancredo declared that President Obama was elected because “we do not have a civics, literacy test before people can vote in this country.”
Literacy and civics test, of course, were notoriously used during the Jim Crow era to keep blacks from voting.
Tancredo, a Colorado Republican, ran for president in 2008 on a hard-line anti-immigration platform, and has been accused in the past of using racially incendiary language.
In his speech, Tancredo also referred to the president as a “committed socialist ideologue,” and pointedly used his full name, “Barack Hussein Obama.”