By Stephen Dinan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

DUBUQUE, Iowa -- Despite his four trips to early primary and caucus states this year, Rep. Tom Tancredo is not running for president -- yet.
    But unless he can force what he called "the top-tier candidates, the guys with all the money, all the stature" in the Republican primary to take a strong position on cracking down on illegal immigration and lowering legal immigration, that is exactly what Mr. Tancredo told several audiences in Iowa this past weekend he will do.
    "My task is to get one of them to take this on," Mr. Tancredo told about 50 members of the Christian Coalition of Iowa who gathered in a community center in Cedar Falls on Friday night. "If they don't do that, if I cannot find someone to do that, if they just give lip service to it and not the heart, yeah, I will run. I will do that."
    The Colorado Republican said the standing ovations he received during his four stops to speak to coalition audiences in Iowa and his reception in other key primary and caucus states like New Hampshire, South Carolina and Georgia are an indication of how important the issue of immigration has become.
    To drive the issue, he has started a political action committee, Team America, being run by Angela "Bay" Buchanan, who ran the campaigns of her brother, former presidential candidate Pat Buchanan. Mr. Tancredo does not have a fundraising goal, but he does have a mission: to make immigration the dominant issue for both Republicans and Democrats running for president in 2008.
    "I want you to confront the people you talk to," he told about 30 people at a home here Saturday. "Make them answer these questions: How are you going to defend our borders? Will you secure them, even if that means the military? Will you go after employers that are presently making the demand side of this equation go up? And how will you do it?"
    He said he thinks 25 percent of Republican primary voters would consider cracking down on illegal immigration a threshold issue. He said none of the prominent candidates is there yet.
    "None of them are coming at it from the heart. None of them are coming at it because they really are true to themselves," he said. "Most of them are coming to it because they are hearing [about] it everywhere they go."
    He also said the problems with the Republican field go beyond immigration.
    "We don't have a very big bench, frankly, on anything, as far as I'm concerned -- a very deep bench on anything. I don't see substance," he said.
    The congressman finds himself at odds with the Bush administration on immigration and trade. But he does have one influential group on his side -- dozens of local radio talk-show hosts, who he says beg him to run and to announce on their programs.
    The 59-year-old former institute director and schoolteacher is unabashedly politically incorrect in doings things like challenging President Bush's claim that the United States is at war with "terrorism."
    "We are at war with militant Islam. That's it. That's the bottom-line basic truth. We'd better understand it, and we'd better react to it," he said. "That's how far this has gone, this politically correct attitude, that you can't even say that. You can't even utter those words."
    But Mr. Tancredo said the real enemy is obvious. "None of the people who drove those planes into buildings were Presbyterians," he said.
    Sitting at a Panera Bread cafe in Cedar Rapids on Friday, talking with a reporter and eating a peanut butter-and-jelly sandwich, Mr. Tancredo said he is considering running for president because the president sets the entire tone for immigration enforcement, and immigration laws passed in Congress do not matter without someone at the top setting a tone.
    "The one guy that I know that would set that tone, the guy sitting across the table from you, is not a person of great money, great financial resources," he said.
    He also said he would be treated as a single-issue candidate if he ran. "I don't want to be a Republican Dennis Kucinich," he said, referring to the Ohio Democratic congressman who ran for president last year on an anti-war platform.
    "I think I won't have to do this. l think it will be something that a smart politician will take up," he said, though it is clear he also is preparing for the possibility that that does not happen.
    "The only reason we have to think about this at length is if we knew it was somebody who's faking it -- if it was Hillary Clinton, for instance," he said, adding, "There are others I would worry about."
    David Yepsen, the influential political columnist for the Des Moines Register, said in a column after his visit that Mr. Tancredo probably could not win the presidential race, but could follow the mold of Pat Robertson, who highlighted social issues in the 1988 contest, or Ross Perot, whose independent candidacy made the federal deficit an issue in the 1992 general election.