The Politics of Arizona’s Great Divide

Arizona and its most watched-over daughter, Gabby Giffords, easily had the largest presence at the State of the Union address. It wasn’t just the empty chair; it was the entire intramural seating chart. The short, subdued ovations. The lack of score settling in the speech or outbursts from the gallery. Even Representative Michele Bachmann, in her Tea Party retort to President Obama’s speech, failed to leap off her usual rhetorical cliffs. A vow to “proclaim liberty throughout the land” was as close as she came.

Other Arizonans were in attendance as Michelle Obama’s guests. Some had been at the First Lady’s side in Tucson a few weeks earlier, like the family of the little girl who was murdered in the Jan. 8 shooting spree and the young (and gay and Hispanic) hero of that chaotic crime scene. But there was a new face of Arizonan compassion as well: Diego Vasquez, an aspiring aerospace engineer from Laveen who helped design an award-winning wheelchair after seeing a disabled friend struggle in school.

See the scenes of those living in danger along the Rio Grande river.)

Giffords watched all of this from her hospital bed in Houston, and one wonders whether she was able to appreciate the irony that this bipartisan restraint — no matter how fleeting — should be inspired by Arizona, a state whose politics are, well, unrestrained. Arizona seems to have adopted a role as the fingernails on the chalkboard of American politics: screeching, cringe-inducing, impossible to ignore. And whatever the amount of comity that hit Congress on the night of Jan. 25, Arizona is going to need much more of it.

Arizona is, after all, the Grand Canyon State. Its defining topographical feature is literally a divide. The politics of the state, not just in these past few weeks but in the past few years, has been all about division, as though every argument we are having as a nation plays out there on a breathtaking scale. The budget is a shambles, the schools are among the worst in the country, the governor is accused of running “death panels” for cutting off funding for organ transplants for some Medicaid patients. Representative Giffords’ Tea Party — backed opponent held a “Get on target for victory” shoot-out at a gun range as a campaign event. Rallies against a controversial immigration bill last year featured so many tearful calls to prayer and accusations of Nazism that it seemed like an all-Hispanic version of the Glenn Beck show. “It’s as bad as I’ve seen in 40 years of observing Arizona politics,” says Bruce Merrill, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University. “We have so many real problems, and all our leadership has done is [pursue] polarizing issues using very strident language.”

(See more about Arizona’s anti-immigration frenzy.)

You would never know, from all we’ve seen and heard, that beneath the national headlines about the state lies something of a silent majority — a deep vein of moderate, accommodating citizens. They’re everywhere, including Tucson, where the shootings took place. Giffords was, literally and figuratively, their representative: open-minded, solution-oriented and largely ignored until her sudden introduction as a victim of much that is wrong with the state rather than a symbol of what is right with it. The Tucson spirit is what first attracted my great-uncle Bernard Friedman, 95, who moved there in the 1940s. As an architect and board member of Tucson’s Chamber of Commerce, he saw a community that managed to grow without growing apart. “In old Tucson,” he told me when I visited him recently, “we all just worked together. There were no politics.” He was saddened but not worried by the shootings. What worries him more is the inability of his adopted state’s leaders to come together. “Today there are politics,” he said. “Good people still, but lots of politics.”

Half of Tucson now seems to be looking south toward the border and the opportunities there, and half seems to lean toward far more conservative Phoenix in the north, more than a little fearful of the border at its back. Whether these halves can be united is not just a question for Tucson to answer. Arizona’s success in wrestling with its demons matters because the state’s three core problems — immigration, health care and education — so closely mirror those of the rest of the country. Its gleaming suburbs were once a symbol of a national boom. Its proximity to America’s second largest trading partner could actually be a blessing, not a curse. The weather — a blue-sky 60ºF in January while the Northeast, Southeast and Midwest dug out once again from blizzards — will continue to draw people. And thanks in part to the housing crisis, there will be plenty of well-priced homes for them to move into.

(See the mourners of the Tucson victims.)

See the scenes of grief after the Tucson shooting.

The question is, Can Arizona get anger management? Can it stop hating itself long enough for the rest of America to fall back in love with it and maybe even learn something from it?

A Structural Problem

A certain level of discord was sewed into the fabric of Arizona from the outset. The center of the state was settled largely by “washed-up 49ers,” as Tucson lawyer and history buff David Hardy puts it, who were returning empty-handed and somewhat wild-eyed from California. Among them was a morphine-addicted prospector named Jack Swilling, who founded Phoenix. The libertarian DNA — the same strain that made Giffords a fan of concealed weapons and caused state senator Lori Klein to carry a handgun to Governor Jan Brewer’s state of the state address at the capitol two days after the Tucson shootings — remains from those early days. Distant from Washington and hardened by the Apache wars, settlers acted first and asked permission from the federal government later. “The pioneer,” wrote Orick Jackson in his 1908 history, “took the matter in hand without any authority, and without a dollar in pay.” That group had little in common with the Mormons who settled the north and not much regard for the Hispanic population that was dominant in the south. It was, says Manuel Hernandez, professor of Mexican-American literature at Arizona State University, an “apartheid state” for Hispanics until the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

(See the discord between Arizona’s sheriffs.)

In part because of this constant culture clash, Arizona is a land of political opposites, both in the statehouse and the delegations it has sent to Washington: Barry Goldwater and Mo Udall, Evan Mecham and Bruce Babbitt, Janet Napolitano and Jan Brewer, J.D. Hayworth and Gabby Giffords. It’s been a reliably Republican state in presidential years since the 1950s (except for 1996, when Clinton took it), but Obama’s team believes it may be able to make a run at it in 2012. It was the only state to oppose the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday (blacks need jobs, not a holiday, suggested then governor Mecham), but it was also the first state in the U.S. to elect women to its top five statewide offices. The governor’s office is precarious: Fife Symington and Mecham were both forced out, Symington after a felony conviction and Mecham after an impeachment, and Napolitano left nearly two years before completing her term to run the Department of Homeland Security. And again, it is young, not even a century old. Arizona has had only a dozen Senators since becoming a state; there are people living in the state now whose grandparents settled the place.

But Arizona is no longer a dusted outpost. Fair weather and cheap housing made the desert boom: a population that was just 700,000 after World War II stands at more than 6.5 million today. The growth in the past 20 years has been nothing short of steroidal: the population mushroomed by 40% in the 1990s and then rose an additional 25% in the first decade of this century. It is now the 16th largest state in the U.S. And that’s just the official population.

Like much of the rest of the country, but more so, Arizona managed this growth like a sun-soaked pyramid scheme: cutting taxes and increasing services as if the fun would never stop. As long as new blood and new business kept heading into the state, Arizona met its budget. The first signs of slowdown, however, began tearing the whole structure down.

(See 10 things to buy during the recession.)

The state of Arizona’s budget is even worse than it looks: a new study estimates that the true deficit is $2.1 billion (more than twice what the legislature says it is). The unemployment rate is exactly that of the U.S. as a whole — 9.4% — but more than half of the homes in Maricopa County, where Phoenix is, are underwater. Most state parks are being shuttered. The public schools are in the bottom 10% of the nation by many metrics.

The current leadership appears singularly unfit to tackle these challenges. Half the legislature seems to treat legislating like an indoor version of the Tombstone 2 p.m. Gunfight Show, giving speeches about pioneer values and then firing a round of blanks. Arizona’s legislature has long been warped by low voter turnout and uncontested districts. “Only ideologues go to the polls,” says Merrill. “In Arizona, that happens to be the right-wingers.” Public financing for campaigns removed most kinds of fundraising and, with them, the moderation that can come with accountability to the business community, so the primaries function as a race to the fringe of acceptable politics.

See video of the Tea Party after-party.

That’s how you get statesmen like Russell Pearce, the Mesa Republican who is now the president of the senate and perhaps the most powerful politician in the state. In 2009 the budgetary meltdown was already in its second year, but Pearce doggedly championed legislation that would force Obama, whom he describes as waging “jihad” against Arizona, to provide proof of his citizenship (it was tabled after being ridiculed around the country). In 2010, Pearce turned to immigration with SB 1070, a bill seemingly purpose-built to provoke not only controversy but also a lengthy court battle, thereby sapping both prestige and resources from a state that needs more of both. This year, the No. 2 priority after the budget, says Pearce, will be legislation calling for the repeal of the 14th Amendment, the one that grants citizenship to any child born on U.S. soil. This, of course, is not anywhere near the jurisdiction of the Arizona legislature.

Governor Brewer and much of the GOP supermajority in the house and senate have responded to the fiscal crisis by preemptively promising that they won’t raise taxes under any circumstances, even though the broader electorate voted last year to raise taxes on themselves to fund education. The legislature’s atonal pledge leaves it only two options: find revenue through shell-game accounting and make drastic cuts in social services. Lawmakers sold their own capitol in Phoenix to a private buyer and then leased it back — money for now, but costly in the long run. They looted lottery earnings earmarked for local transportation and tried to do the same with cigarette-tax money meant for early-childhood health and education programs (voters rejected that attempt in November). House Democrats, for their part, railed about $10 billion in “outrageous tax loopholes” for Republicans’ “rich, special-interest friends”: they were mostly referring to the fact that the sales tax, by design, applies only to retail goods. That’s the law, not a loophole.

(See the reinvention of Jan Brewer.)

Nevertheless, the governor’s cuts to services and programs have been myopic. The state invited plenty of criticism when it began denying coverage last year for lifesaving transplants to some Medicaid patients. On Jan. 25, Brewer formally requested waivers from the federal government to trim Medicaid rolls even further “despite already painful reductions,” her office said. A host of other cuts not only diminish Arizona today but also hurt the economic future of the state. School librarians are gone, college counselors scarce. State funding for all-day kindergarten was eliminated, along with some dropout-prevention programs. Child Protective Services caseworkers have been furloughed. Expensive tuition-credit programs, however, which give tax breaks to both rich and poor families that send their kids to private schools, survived.

The Immigration Riddle

No issue presents as great a challenge — or has been met with as much asinine grandstanding — as immigration. It’s not a fight that Arizona chose. Its long border with the Mexican state of Sonora is ruled by forces beyond Arizona’s control: NAFTA, federal border prerogatives and the Mexican economy have all affected the inflow and outflow of people, guns and drugs across the desert.

(See photos of the Mexican border violence.)

There are parts of southern Arizona that are, in a way, martyred land. Ranchers and Tohono O’odham tribe members along the border feel besieged by piles of migrant trash, the heavy federal presence and armed drug runners. These Arizonans are paying the price for a failed and cynical federal policy, which fed the U.S. addiction for cheap labor while denying that the addiction existed. During the boom years, migrants knew they could find jobs working for Americans up north. They just had to trample Arizona’s desert to get there. This was, for too long, the acceptable status quo for the federal government.

The problem is that Arizona has responded to a complicated crisis with what Jennifer Allen, executive director of the Border Action Network, calls a “bumper-sticker mentality.” Senator John McCain, once an august brand in Arizona politics, claimed that illegals were intentionally causing traffic accidents on the freeways, a statement he later retracted. Even as crime rates fell in 2009, Brewer — a decent person with an indecent habit of pandering to the Pearce wing of the state’s GOP — sounded similar alarms on a daily basis, calling the border a “battlefield” and bemoaning “the terror which our citizens live in day in and day out along the border.”

See TIME’s video of an Arizonan illegal immigrant looking to enlist in the army.

This near hysteria about what is for the most part just an army of litterers obscures some important truths. First, because of the economic downturn, migration rates were down even before SB 1070; the border patrol’s Tucson Sector made 24% fewer apprehensions in fiscal 2009 than in fiscal 2008. Second, immigrants, both documented and undocumented, are deeply enmeshed in Arizona. Calling for the heads of all illegals has driven huge numbers of Arizonans from the public square but not back over the border. According to Merrill, up to 30% of undocumented Arizonans live in mixed-status families — that is, with a spouse, child or sibling who is a U.S. citizen or legal resident. Given that Arizona is destined to become a Hispanic-majority state sometime in the next three decades, that’s a large number of the state’s legal future residents whose relatives are now being hunted by the state in word and deed.

Clarisa Flores, an undocumented Tucsonan, told me that the “violence of the language is rising” against her and others. Her “fantasy,” she says, is to “raise awareness, so people can understand us and not just attack and judge us.” I also spoke with Marta Muñoz, an undocumented mother of three who has lived in Tucson for 16 years. She was detained after a highway stop and spent nearly a week in jail; her case is now before a judge. The impact of this “bitter experience,” says Muñoz, is that her 10-year-old daughter, a U.S. citizen, has become more withdrawn and fearful about her life. “She’s having nervous problems,” says Muñoz. “She thinks every time I leave for the store, I’m never coming back.” Muñoz’s husband, who worked for years building the houses that fed Tucson’s growth, is now in the black market of day labor, doing yard work or whatever he can find. But Muñoz can’t bring herself to uproot her daughter from the only place she’s ever known. “She has dreams, American dreams,” says Muñoz. “I can’t rob those from her.”

(See photos of immigrant detention in Arizona.)

There’s too much anger in the state for the politicians to see that Muñoz’s daughter is part of the future of Arizona. And not only her but also the thousands of citizens like her. So when the lawmakers decided to cut dropout-prevention programs — the Hispanic dropout rate is particularly abysmal — they may have fulfilled a campaign promise, but they also dented Arizona’s prospects.

Another important truth lost in the noise is that there are reasonable law-enforcement activities that can specifically target that minority of foreign nationals who are dangerous criminals. On the day of the State of the Union speech, the U.S. Attorney for Arizona announced the bust of a gun-smuggling ring that bought hundreds of AK-47s in Phoenix-area gun shops and carried them into Mexico.

The raids were the product of exactly the kind of tough, precise policy that Giffords championed when it came to the drug cartels; a bill she co-sponsored with a California Republican last year gave law enforcement important new tools for cracking down on the cash cards that smugglers used to launder money. But in the din of Arizona border politics, hardly anyone noticed.

(See how the border is actually one of the safest places.)

Giffords’ was not the only empty chair for the State of the Union address. Georgia Republican Representative Paul Broun, who had called the idea of Democrats and Republicans sitting together a “trap,” watched the speech from his office and cast stones at Obama through Twitter. “Mr. President, you don’t believe in the Constitution,” he wrote toward the end of the speech. “You believe in socialism.”

So the State of the Union was really the state of two absentees, who represent two vastly different ideas about politics and political discourse. Broun, like so much of the Arizona legislature, is confrontational, unapologetic. Giffords was never much for grandstanding, nor was she particularly good at it (as her anemic p.r. campaign for her cash-card bill showed). Mainly, she looked for sensible solutions and tried to make them work. Let’s just hope her silence continues to be louder than all the shouting, in Arizona and beyond.

This article originally appeared in the Feb. 7, 2011 issue of TIME.

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