Rum, Romanism and Rebellion

It may be because he is stalking the borderlands with a flashlight, but many people both here and on our more conservative sister blogs have noted that Steve Huffman has been scarce at many candidate fora (you like that? That’s the proper plural of “forum”). The wags over at Sonoran Alliance have even noted that he missed one forum that was spitting distance from his house.

Randy Graf’s attacks on Huffman are also talking up his absence, not from public events, but from the legislative votes. Interestingly, as the Arizona Daily Star points out this morning, Graf chooses to compare his record from two sessions with Huffman’s record from a different one.

Graf’s number juggling aside, Huffman missed 28% of the votes in the last session. This includes a no show for a vote on border radar and missing preliminary votes on employment verification and immigration enforcement bills. This wouldn’t be such a big deal, people miss votes all the time, except he’s trying to paint himself as a smiling southern Arizona version of Tomás Tancredo.

This calls into question his broader strategy. First of all, his not showing up to public events strikes me as incredibly stupid. It’s not as though people will think he’s more pallatable because they haven’t met him. If Huffman thinks that avoiding public appearances is a way to placate the right, I have two words for him: Joe Lane.

Graf, despite being the titular head of the right wing of Southern Arizona Republicans, is polling well below 50%. This means that there are plenty of Republicans who don’t buy into his vision of their party. Anyone remember when Huffman was the moderate alternative? Whatever happened to that? With all due respect Steve, no one is buying the Huffman as Right-Winger thing, even us Democrats aren’t.

NB – Okay, a few of you are asking, who is Joe Lane?

Lane was Speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives during the impeachment of Evan Mecham. In the end, Lane voted for impeachment. He represented Cochise, Graham and Greenlee counties, and although the district was not Mormon majority, it did include communities such as Duncan, Thatcher and St. David with large LDS populations. The Mormon community was angry about the first Mormon governor being removed from office, and Lane was particularly vulnerable to their anger because of their numbers in his district. In the next election, Lane couldn’t be found at public events in the district. On the other hand, his seat mate, Democrat Gus Arzberger, did go. He explained to people his reasons for impeachment, which came down to: “The man lied to my face.”

The fact that Arzberger voted for impeachment was still not popular, but he always felt that the fact that he was willing to explain himself earned him some respect. When the smoke cleared, Lane lost his primary, and Arzberger was re-elected until term limits forced him from office twelve years later.