Sen. Kyrsten Sinema A Rare Democrat . . . Who Tries Edging, But Not Rushing, To The Right

By DEXTER DUGGAN

PHOENIX — Politics, like life itself, has a way of thrusting up the unknown person and dumping the famous. Who nationally had heard of Georgia politician Jimmy Carter in 1975? Who wanted to hear of fumbling ex-President Jimmy Carter after 1980?
Empowered U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D., Ariz.), much in the headlines these days, is an example of being on the ascent.
Not that star power necessarily lasts. Just ask a bygone movie sensation. Indeed, the iconic 1950 film Sunset Boulevard told the tragic tale of a silent-film star plotting her return.
Still, being a U.S. senator is to belong to a club of only 100 people in the nation, with, as Sinema currently has, the power that rumbles from coast to coast to tip the balance in an upper chamber on a knife-edge, split at 50-50.
Who was the most powerful man in New York City in 1740? Or the most powerful in Paris in 1588? A commanding word from him meant much then, but he’s only dust on a history book’s pages now.
His actions lived after him, of course, maybe even to the extent that something he said or did influenced one of your ancestors in a way that came to affect you, whether you’re aware of it or not. But this deceased powerbroker likely is out of luck if he expected that centuries to come would worship his memory.
Twenty years ago the young Sinema had taken pride in being a gadfly Arizona radical lefty and greenie — who, however, couldn’t get elected. That’s when she began to start inching into different political territory.
If Sinema wasn’t a political chameleon, she at least learned to appreciate which way the wind blew for chameleons, and for humans, too. That understanding may be what served her navigating through subsequent years, to the point that today many of her previous liberal supporters rue the work they did for her successful 2018 U.S. Senate campaign.
It’s not as if being pro-abortion and pro-homosexual hurt Democrat changeling Sinema with strings-pulling Arizona establishment insiders back when they were happily preparing in 2002 to push pro-abortion, pro-homosexual Democrat Janet Napolitano into the governor’s chair after having arranged a disruptive four-candidate race in that general election.
Of course, they carefully played down Napolitano’s radicalism to the public.
Sinema got into the Arizona legislature, then served three terms in the U.S. House. When unpopular one-term incumbent “moderate” Republican U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake announced he wouldn’t run again, cautious Sinema decided to take a chance and jumped into the 2018 race for the upper chamber.
She had the added advantage that establishment Republicans like U.S. Sen. Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, had decided that no conservatives but only GOP Cong. Martha McSally, a “moderate” from southern Arizona, was fit to be the Republican nominee in the race for Flake’s Senate seat.
However, following a less than inspiring general-election campaign, McSally was declared the loser to Sinema by nearly 56,000 votes, after a week-long vote count of more than 2.3 million ballots.
In December 2018 I wrote in The Wanderer that the atheist, bisexual Sinema had taken her Senate campaign unimpeded right onto the grounds of Catholic St. Mary’s Basilica here during a Mexican fiesta.
I wrote that on Election Day The New York Times ran a large photo where “Sinema was pictured holding the hands of a man wearing a sombrero and face paint while surrounded by other Latinos. The accompanying story about several Democratic campaigns said Sinema ‘spent part of Sunday hugging her way through the crowd’.”
Sinema seems to like power, which she’d like to keep — and which circumscribes her a bit because of the Arizona electorate. It’s not as if she has a constituency of dominant liberal voters in Manhattan backing up their radical Democrat U.S. Sen. Charles Schumer.
(Sure, downstate New York is more left-wing than farther north, but it has the numbers that rural areas lack — a fact hardly confined to the Empire State.)
Whatever Sinema finally decides on the huge Democratic spending bills currently twisting before Congress (this article was written on October 26), she had been through the wringer of a hostile dominant media that sneered at her in a way often reserved for conservative Republicans.
To those of us in Phoenix who recall the wacky local loser Kyrsten at the turn of the century, it’s a sight to behold of her popping up these days on the front pages of The New York Times and Washington Post as a dreadful figure with incomprehensible, allegedly right-wing motives.
Dominant national Democrats as usual had been acting as if it’s their right to grab people’s earnings to fund waste, untethered ideology, and profligacy — sort of like telling your fellow commuter that you have the right to pick his pocket to buy yourself a limousine and stop riding the bus.
True, it’s tempting to hope that Democrat tax increases would hurt only Democrat-loving tech and corporate billionaires, but Dems have a way of shielding their friends while fastening their pinchers on you. Remember, back around the start of the twentieth century, that new income-tax thing was touted to take a bite only from the wealthy.
The Politico site posted on October 26: “With their new billionaires tax proposal meant to placate Sinema, Democrats are building an entirely new tax regime on the fly, amid numerous questions over not only how it would work but whether it is even constitutional. And that’s not to mention hostility from House Democratic tax writers, who have already approved a comprehensive package focused on rate hikes.”
The Wanderer asked three sources to comment on Sinema.
Fr. Frank Pavone, national director of Priests for Life, said: “In a political climate of the kind of Democrat extremism we have today, as that party wholeheartedly advances policies that destroy our nation and deny the principles on which it was founded, we welcome any evidence of what might pass as ‘moderation’ or ‘reasonableness’ among Democrat lawmakers.
“I spend less time assessing the sincerity of such views,” Pavone said, “and more assessing how we can show these lawmakers the political advantage they do stand to gain from distancing themselves from extremism.”
Conservative Republican Arizona political consultant Constantin Querard said: “Sinema is a reminder that outside of gifted athletes or actors who come to prominence because of a tremendous talent (combined with hard work), most of the people we consider famous or powerful are regular people, usually from regular roots.
“Obama was a community organizer, then a state legislator, then suddenly a U.S. senator and then president of the United States,” Querard said. “Yes, he had political talent, but so do 100 other liberal Democrats just like him at the exact same time. It is often coincidence, good fortune, or some particularly good timing that hands certain people winning lottery tickets, or their career equivalents.
“It is also why voters should always remember that our elected officials work for us and should not be assumed to be better than us or smarter than us, because the vast majority of them are just like us,” he said.
Seth Leibsohn, a political strategist and talk host at Phoenix-based KKNT (960 AM), said: “There have been lions of the Senate and we are now in the age where there are also lionesses. Sen. Sinema represents the first example to my mind of a public elected (or appointed) figure who ‘moved right’ to satisfy and justify her position in our representative republic and her position with the media.
“Sinema is a fighter — she fought convention or ‘the system,’ as they used to say, as a socialist and she fights the convention of socialism now that it is in power,” Leibsohn said. “A frightening reality, but thank God. Sinema will probably disappoint on a lot of issues, but as Lincoln put it, you stand with any man that stands right when he’s right and depart from him when he is gone.
“Will her career be a series of these kinds of positions? Too early to say, but if she helps drag the Democratic Party back to something like a political center, Arizonans will reward her with continued re-elections,” he said. “If she stays somewhat pointed to common sense here and there, given the Democratic Party today, she deserves rewarding here and there.
“She’s come this far without buckling, so I assume she’s made of some pretty strong stuff, stronger stuff than her fellow senator who comes with a title of captain in the Navy,” Leibsohn said, referring to Arizona’s other U.S. senator, Democrat Mark Kelly.

Tried To Save An Unborn Baby

Another prominent name currently in the news in Arizona politics, although not as well-known nationally as Sinema, is former Republican Grant Woods, the first chief of staff to John McCain as a new U.S. congressman back in the early 1980s. They both came to enjoy poking their thumbs in the eyes of conservative Republicans.
Woods, who later served two terms as Arizona attorney general, suddenly died on October 23, at age 67, reportedly of a heart attack. Reporting the death, Capitol Media Services writer Howard Fischer reviewed Woods’ long list of differences with the GOP, including his endorsing Sinema in her 2018 race, when he also announced he was a Democrat.
At least when he was a talk host on Phoenix-based KFYI Radio in 1999, Woods joined the effort to try to save a young teenager’s advanced-pregnancy preborn baby under threat in the court system. However, pro-abortion Janet Napolitano, then Arizona attorney general, and the local establishment rushed the girl to George Tiller’s dismemberment abortuary in Kansas.
Leibsohn commented on Woods for The Wanderer.
“My only interaction with Mr. Woods was one interview where he was supporting a Democrat, Fred DuVal, for governor and doing so as a Republican,” he said. “His main reason he told me was because he and Fred were roommates once in college — which I gather meant that if fortune had bunked him with a young Doug Ducey, he’d have supported him. Helova principled stand, that.”
Ducey went on to be the GOP governor of Arizona.
“And, of course, if it simply was about personalities over principles, there was no need for him to keep saying he did so as a Republican,” Leibsohn said.
“I’ve noted Mr. Woods, since then, change his party about three times in four years. I don’t see and never saw much principle there; I saw a lot of posturing with no main or serious worldview outside of being a renegade who liked media attention and kicking the teeth of the Republican Party whose views and leaders he would distort in order to do that kicking and get that tantrum-like attention,” he said.
“For all the accolades of wisdom and adulthood in our politics, honestly I can’t think of one thing he ever said that was interesting or memorable or any stand he took on principle other than his own media profile,” Leibsohn said.