Lucero touts conservative credentials
By John Fryar
© 2010 Longmont Times-Call
LONGMONT —Tom Lucero said Tuesday that if he’s elected to Congress, he wouldn’t compromise his conservative Republican principles, even if pressured to do so by GOP leaders.
"Part of the reason the Republicans got tossed out" of their majority control of Congress, he said, "is that we got the power and then we behaved like Democrats."
During a Tuesday night campaign event at the Izaak Walton Park clubhouse here, Lucero — a University of Colorado regent — said he’d demonstrated his independence by occasionally being the sole dissenter in 8-1 votes by CU’s governing board members.
Lucero, a Berthoud resident who’s a former restaurant owner and the founding partner of a recently established software company, is one of four Republicans vying for the chance to challenge U.S. Rep. Betsy Markey, D-Fort Collins, in next fall’s general election in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District.
Lucero told the nine people who showed up for his Longmont appearance that his experience and accomplishments as a CU regent have shown that “it’s possible to change the culture of government.”
Lucero said he’s running for Congress because citizens’ freedoms and liberties are under assault from the federal government. He said too many politicians now in Washington, D.C., “believe they know better how to run our lives than we do.”
He called himself “the true conservative in this race,” one who wants to get government “out of the way of the free market.”
Also, Lucero said, “I’m the only one who has the real-world, real-life experiences” of a small-business owner who’s created jobs.
The other GOP candidates seeking their party’s 4th Congressional District nomination are state Rep. Cory Gardner, a Yuma attorney whose family owns a farm implement dealership there; financial adviser Diggs Brown, a Colorado National Guard major and a former Fort Collins city councilman; and Dean Madere of Loveland, a territory manager for Lenox who’s also a board member of a local 9.12 Project conservative activist group.
John Fryar can be reached at 303-684-5211 or jfryar@times-call.com.
http://www.timescall.com/news_story.asp?ID=20843