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Instead, Tancredo offered another measure of his success. He mused about the early days of his crusade, the hundreds of hours spent on talk radio shows. "I used to ask myself, 'Does anyone care? Is anybody listening?'" He doesn't wonder anymore. The Hillary driver's license flap and his Republican opponents' surprisingly brutal dogfights on sanctuary cities and lawn workers are proof enough. When Tancredo repeated his debate one-liner about the other Republican candidates trying to "out-Tancredo Tancredo," everyone laughed appreciatively, then sighed. Predictably, Tancredo has his doubts as to whether anyone can actually out-Tancredo him. "I love the rhetoric," he said. "But how can we really know who believes in their heart and who is just watching polls?"

As the primary campaign enters its twilight and Tancredo prepares to retire from the congressional seat he's held since 1999, a certain melancholy began to seep in as the evening wound up. "I don't want this conversation to end just because the frontrunners take over," a woman said, her voice strained with emotion. Tancredo paused and looked down for a few moments. "God doesn't say we have to win every battle, but we do have to fight," he said finally, adding. "You can move people. You can move nations. And it starts in rooms like this with people like you.

"You can become so defeatist and just walk away from it all," he continued. "Well, I refuse."

There are worse political epitaphs.

American Spectator Contributing Editor Shawn Macomber is writing a book on the Global Class War.

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