Sixth-District Colorado Congressman Mike Coffman fired up the party faithful Saturday at the Republican Lincoln Day Dinner in Centennial by unleashing a tea-party-style broadside lambasting President Obama as the leader of a socialist takeover of America.
“This election will be a referendum on the direction of our country,” he said. “This election will be a referendum on whether America continues to go down the path of socialism or down the path of a free-enterprise system.”
Coffman likened this year in politics to 1776. He said Republican voters would rise up against “the forces” of Obama like the American colonists rose up against King George to win independence from the British.
“Come election time when Barack Obama has lost the Congress of America and his march of socialism in America is halted and his assaults on individual liberty in America are stopped, you will hear him say ‘Where did all these people come from?’ “
Coffman holds the seat formerly held by anti-illegal immigration firebrand Tom Tancredo, and Coffman on Saturday placed immigration politics close to the center of his talk. He said that Obama’s administration embraced defacto policies that granted sanctuary in this county to illegal aliens. He said Denver and Boulder were “sanctuary cities” in Colorado that defied the law of the land by not seeking to deport undocumented residents.
Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper’s administration has told the Colorado Independent that the city complies with all federal and state laws to refer illegal aliens to immigration and customs authorities.
Coffman said he was planning to travel to Arizona in support of that state’s recent controversial immigration laws.
Candidates for office dotted the room at the Centennial Center where the Denver and Aurora parties fundraiser was held, including U.S. Senate candidates Jane Norton and Ken Buck, Seventh-District Congressional candidate Ryan Frazier and gubernatorial candidate Dan Maes. Conspicuously absent was Maes’s primary opponent, front-runner Scott McInnis, who is reeling from revelations that he plagiarized articles he was commissioned to write four years ago by the conservative Hasan Family Foundation.
