When I moved to Arizona about 3 ½ years ago I never dreamed that my new home state would soon be the center of a political storm over illegal immigration and that this would likely bring about a sea change in congressional representation,
For it wasn’t all that long ago when they fawned over him.
But now, three congressional Democrats from Arizona are twisting in the wind as their beloved party leader Barack Obama continues to punish their cash-strapped state with a costly and unpopular lawsuit designed to prevent the implementation of the new immigration law.
Now it’s Obama versus the people with congressional Democrats caught in the middle.
But things were very different on February 17, 2009.
The delegation standing on the tarmac was electrified with excitement as Air Force One rolled to a stop at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport. The man who was the embodiment of their dreams – the man who would give everyone a job, apologize to the world for President Bush, punish the “rich people” who “earned too much” over the previous eight years, give everyone in the U.S. “free” healthcare, make the world love America again, and ensure a Democrat majority in the Congress for years to come was visiting Arizona.
There was the congenial Harry Mitchell quite giddy with anticipation snapping pictures as Obama stepped down from the aircraft. But Harry Mitchell is an elected member of Congress and he represents many thousands of Arizonans who expect to see more than a mere cheerleader, more than an adoring father-figure.
Today, Congressman Mitchell appears to be on a path to electoral defeat because of 18 months of cheerleading and adoration of a man with a self-serving agenda.
Things have become so bad that Mitchell has had to suggest to the “Dear Leader” that there might be better ways to spend the people’s money than by suing Arizona. Worse yet he has had to join the call to secure the U.S. border with Mexico, an idea that has been championed by Republicans for decades and by Tea Partiers and Minutemen for at least the past 6 years. But it is too little, too late as November will surely show.
And he is not alone as Gabriella Giffords of Tucson and Anne Kirkpatrick of Central Arizona try to retain their seats in Washington by renouncing their policy of following the leader.
So, what happened? What has changed in the last 18 months to force these Obama partisans to now disagree with him? And how could these elected officials have so horribly miscalculated the true sentiments of their constituents?
The answer is that they saw their hopes and aspirations in the embodiment of one man, one personality, one persona. Now they are in the midst of a painful process of discovering that Obama’s agenda was never about them, never about the Democratic Party and never about the United States.
They have been slavishly empowering a man who is committed to his own raw pursuit of power, and they are now finding themselves to be victims of that agenda.
But then again nobody ever went broke by underestimating the intelligence of politicians. As Exhibit A, consider the case of one Peggy West, a County Supervisor from Wisconsin who last week made this amazing statement about Arizona’s new immigration legislation.
“If this was Texas, which is a state that is directly on the border with Mexico, and they were calling for a measure like this saying that they had a major issue with undocumented people flooding their borders, I would have to look twice at this. But this is a state that is a ways removed from the border.”
Heaven help us all.
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