An Arizona state senator may have committed political suicide while campaigning to promote himself to the United States Congress. Steve Smith, who resides in Maricopa, a small town south of the Phoenix area tucked between two Indian reservations, is one of three Republicans hoping to unseat Democratic Congressman Tom O’Halleran. First elected to the Arizona legislature in 2010, Smith’s achievements include joining 15 fellow legislators to support designation of a “National Day of the Cowboy.” The legislation reads, “the cowboy is a true American icon occupying a central place in the public’s imagination.” The Day of the Cowboy, an actual thing, is celebrated on the 4th Saturday of July, which this year falls on the 28th. Yippee-ki-yay.
Back to political suicide – but first, a side note. Smith is not the only suicidal politician in Arizona this year. For example, Yahya Yuksel, a Democratic candidate for the Congressional seat being vacated by Martha McSally, who is running for the Senate, so impressed his fellow Democrats that the Pima County Democratic Party Executive Board voted to recommend that fellow Dems support one of the six other candidates. Anybody but Yahya. The 28-year-old burned his bridges when asked about allegations he had raped an intoxicated teen age girl when he was in high school. (He was never charged.) Yuksel fielded the questions by abruptly leaving the news conference. He returned after a confrontation and the event turned into an ugly shouting match. The spectacle motivated Democratic leaders to get their Yahya out.
Then there’s Bobby Wilson, a Republican gun advocate running for the Arizona Legislature from District Two, which stretches from the Tucson metropolitan area to the Mexican border. The Arizona Republic reported that Wilson addressed a “big crowd gathered in a Tucson church last week, ready to hear candidates’ plans for gun-control legislation.” Bobby echoed the NRA’s “good guy with a gun” trope, then shared a heart-warming anecdote about shooting his mother in the face and killing her. He assured the appalled group that he acted in self-defense, although he also managed to kill his sister and burn down the house. He was charged with homicide, but never convicted. He eventually returned to school, became a lawyer, and is running a campaign based partially on matricide. Yippee-ki-yay, Mother.
Steve Smith hasn’t danced around the absurdity maypole quite as colorfully as Yahya and Bobby, but he may regret making a statement at a campaign event in Marana. Invoking his experience as a member of the Legislature, Smith told the audience, “I want to be able to do the things we’ve been able to do that has made Arizona so successful.” Putting aside the grammatical hiccup (“things … has?”), the problem is his contention that Arizona is “so successful.” That might not be the most effective bragging point.
For example, Smith is running largely on his devotion to “family values,” based on his campaign website. He has work to do: “Wallet Hub” ranks Arizona 40th in its survey of “Best States to Raise A Family.” The 2018 Kids Count Data Book also places Arizona near the bottom when it comes to taking care of kids. The state is 46th in “economic well-being,” 45th in “education,” and 46th in “family and community.” The overall ranking is 45th. The highest rating – 38th of all the states – was in the area of “health.” The likely explanation for that score is Arizona’s decision, supported by legislative Democrats and a handful of Republicans, to expand the State’s Medicaid rolls under the Affordable Care Act. Arizona’s uninsured rate dropped from 17.1% of the population in 2013 to 10.8% in 2016, the 12th largest decrease in the nation. Mr. “Family Values” not only voted against that expansion, he joined other Republican legislators in suing to overturn the expansion and deny health care to thousands of Arizonans, many of them children. Yippee-ki-family-values-yay.
Here’s how “successful” Arizona is: data from the U. S. Bureau of the Census show Arizona had the 8th highest poverty rate in the country in 2017, as reported by U. S. News & World Report. “Wallet Hub’s” analysis of the states with the most underprivileged children in 2017 ranked Arizona 6th. A state with the nation’s 8th lowest GDP per capita is going to take a while to improve those figures – especially with “family values” legislators like Steve Smith who vote to deny health care to their constituents. Smith’s refusal, with other Arizona Republicans, to adequately fund schools has resulted in Arizona being ranked 45th in the nation by Education Week. This is the Arizona “success” Smith hopes to inflict on the nation.
Smith’s desire to make America “successful” in the same manner as Arizona does, however, suggest a timely and appropriate campaign slogan. The candidate should copy from Donald Trump, whom he admires, and stitch this on his baseball cap:
MASAMAAZ: “Make America Suck As Much As Arizona.” Yippee-ki-yay.
© 2018 by Mike Tully
Putin’s Pet Pachyderm
Around the time Ford was debuting the Lincoln Continental, thousands of Nazis were filing into New York’s Madison Square Garden, many of them brandishing swastikas on flags and armbands. Some 22,000 of them packed the arena, facing a giant portrait – not of Adolph Hitler, but of George Washington, whom the German American Bund had ordained, “the first fascist.” Bund members, Americans of German descent, were the most notorious Nazi sympathizers in the United States. But they were not alone. The next year the “America First Committee” was formed to oppose American involvement in World War Two. At its peak the America First Committee had some 800,000 members, most considerably more mainstream than the Bund membership. Its ranks included a future President (Gerald Ford) and a future Supreme Court Justice (Potter Stewart). The Committee, concerned about accusations of anti-Semitism, removed two notorious anti-Semites from its executive committee: former U. S. Olympic Chairman Avery Brundage, who had banned two Jewish athletes from the 1936 Berlin Olympics, and Henry Ford, Edsel’s father. Unfortunately, the Committee failed to excise its most famous spokesperson, Charles Lindbergh, who denounced American Jews for “their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government.”
The German American Bund dissolved in late 1939 and the America First Committee evaporated in the heat of World War Two. Both were consigned to history’s footnotes until Donald Trump became President. He recalled the America First Committee by using the term “America First” in his campaign and inaugural address and his tacit approval of a white nationalist march in Charlottesville, Virginia, rekindled memories of the Madison Square Garden event of 1939. But the analogy to World War Two geopolitics is not limited to Trump’s white nationalism, ugly as it is, but to his embrace of a leader and nation whose interests run counter to ours.
Just as the German American Bund and the America First Committee served the interests of Adolph Hitler, Trump serves the interests of Vladimir Putin. His efforts to inflame and aggravate social and racial tensions in the U. S. mirror activities by Russian bots on social media. He legitimizes Putin by ignoring his attacks on political dissent and a free press, his ordering overseas assassinations, his annexation of Crimea and unlawful intervention in the Ukraine, and his power play in the Middle East. He denounces the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election as a political “witch hunt” and endorses Putin’s denials over the unanimous verdict of American intelligence agencies that Russian meddling continues. Trump’s denunciation of our closest allies jeopardizes America’s world standing and elevates Russia’s and his attacks on the NATO alliance threaten the free world’s best defense against Russian aggression. When Trump and Putin recently stood side-by-side in Helsinki it was sickeningly obvious that Putin was the puppet master and Trump his marionette.
The Bund, Committee and other German sympathizers never amounted to more than a fringe irritant in American society that did not present a clear and present danger to the nation. But what if their sentiments had been shared by forty percent of the country? Could a nation so divided have been able to stand up to Germany and its allies? Could a house divided have led the trans-Atlantic alliance? Would that America have stood as a symbol of hope and freedom for the rest of the world?
In 2018 America, we have been attacked and our President has sided with the attacker. More dangerously, he has taken his supporters and what used to be a respectable political party with him. The Republican majority in Congress is feckless and irresponsible. “Few Republican officials today are willing to openly criticize the president, even if they have deeply held reservations about Trump’s ability to govern,” wrote former Republican Congressman David Jolly. “They instead keep their laments private, their panic measured and their comments off the record.” That leaves Trump alone to fashion the message for his followers and the results would make even Putin smile. A recent Gallup Poll shows that 40% of Republicans view Russia as an ally or friend, a rating that nearly doubled in four years. Putin’s popularity among Republicans has doubled in three years, according to the Pew Research Center. That’s why Trump knows he can embrace Putin and get away with it. His followers make him feel supported and protected – like hip waders in sewage.
It has come to this: in 2018 America, you can be a patriot, or you can be a Republican. You cannot simultaneously be both.
© 2018 by Mike Tully
<<< DOWNLOAD A PDF VERSION OF THIS POSTING HERE >>>