Rep. Steve King: Worst Endorsement Ever?

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by: Colorado Pols

Republican Rep. Steve King is obviously so safe in his Iowa district that it doesn’t really matter what crazy crap comes out of his mouth — he’s going to get re-elected one way or the other. But that doesn’t mean that he’s a good guy to have on your list of endorsements.

You might recall in 2010 that Cory Gardner cancelled a fundraiser with King as the featured guest after King’s bizarre comments to the media that President Obama has a “default mechanism” that “favors the black person.” Then-gubernatorial candidate Tom Tancredo welcomed King for his own fundraiser, and Tancredo no doubt would be pleased with the kind of rhetoric that King spewed out recently.

According to Salon.com, King compared immigrants to, well, to dogs:

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, compared immigrants to dogs at a town hall meeting yesterday, telling constituents that the U.S. should pick only the best immigrants the way one chooses the “pick of the litter.”

King told the crowd in Pocahontas, Iowa, that he’s owned lots of bird dogs over the years and advised, “You want a good bird dog? You want one that’s going to be aggressive? Pick the one that’s the friskiest…not the one that’s over there sleeping in the corner.”

King suggested lazy immigrants should be avoided as well. “You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog. Well, we’ve got the pick of every donor civilization on the planet,” King said. “We’ve got the vigor from the planet to come to America.”

So what’s that have to do with Colorado politics? Well, King recently endorsed Mitt Romney for President, which is probably helpful with certain Tea Party constituents but might not be as useful with everyone else — including undecided Colorado voters who hear about these comments through an aggressive Obama campaign.

6 thoughts on “Rep. Steve King: Worst Endorsement Ever?”

Jones Smith says:

May 22, 2012 at 11:03 pm

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DougcoDem says:

May 22, 2012 at 11:31 pm

I have never been a Republican but I have known some in my time in Arapahoe and Douglas County. That said, the ones I knew were nothing like this – the GOP leadership now is bat shit crazy. I suppose those folks in Iowa were just eating this up, though.

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1. ArapaGOP says:
  
  May 22, 2012 at 11:41 pm
  
  What Rep. King said was less that artful. All he meant was that we should try to attract the best qualified and hardest working immigrants who follow the rules to come here!
  
  King spokesman Jimmy Centers said the clip takes King’s words out of context. “The congressman was simply stating the reason why our country is so great is because it’s made up of hardworking individuals who emigrated here.”
  
  King was not comparing immigrants to dogs in the pejorative. This is something one would say about people of any color in rural America, a place Democrats fear to tread.
  
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  1. RedGreen says:
    
    May 22, 2012 at 11:43 pm
    
    You’re right, he was comparing immigrants to dogs in a flattering way. You’ve totally made your point!
    
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Dave Sabados says:

May 23, 2012 at 1:20 am

I worked for a Dem candidate against him in 2008, and this kind of thing is nothing new for him. For anyone not familiar, here is a short list of some of King’s more famous statements:

http://iowaindependent.com/215…

Redistricting reduced Iowa from 5 congressional districts to 4, and the old 5th was comprised of the most conservative counties in the state, so the new 4th that King is running in is slightly more competitive (I believe it’s down to an R+4 on the CPVI from an R+9). I haven’t followed the race, but this time around King faces his best known and strongest opponent yet in Former First Lady of Iowa Christie Vilsack.

On a Colorado note, King doesn’t just sound like Tom Tancredo, they even look very similar and apparently get mistaken for each other often.

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1. Sage Sam says:
  
  May 23, 2012 at 11:17 pm
  
  Tom has said plenty of asinine things but there is a big difference between he and King. Tancredo isn’t a racist. Tancredo’s positions are ass backwards and counter-productive, but no one that knows him would ever say he was a race baiting jackass in the vein of Steve King.
  
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