Conservative bloggers and pundits all over the country have been jumping on the anti-Napolitano bandwagon over this weekend's abortive terror attack on an international flight into Detroit. They're looking at her initial statement that "the system worked" followed by a retraction of that statement as evidence that she should be blamed for the attack. Some are even hinting that she should lose her job over this.
I'm not so sure that will happen - no one was hurt and the security failures occured overseas in other countries that were, are, and will continue to be out of her jurisdiction - but let's just assume for the moment that the Obama Administration decides that they need a scapegoat for this and
If she becomes unemployed, she again becomes the favorite over John McCain in next year's election for a seat in the U.S. Senate.
With all due respect to Tucson City Councilman Rodney Glassman, he's got a better chance to win the seat if JD Hayworth is successful in his quest to knock off McCain in a primary.
McCain would be a tough, almost unbeatable, opponent in the general election; Hayworth less so.
Far less so.
Anyway, back to the main point...Napolitano was the Democrats' best bet at dethroning McCain before she went to D.C. with Obama. She's shown that she can win statewide elections (3 of them! 2 without winning Maricopa County!) and was smart enough to keep the loons in the lege in check while she occupied the 9th Floor.
While there was no guarantee that she *would* have won a race against McCain, it was a race that most political junkies in AZ wanted to see in the same way that fans of the two biggest-name heavyweight boxers from rival promotions want to see their fighters face off.
That all went away when Napolitano took the promotion to Secretary of Homeland Security.
If she ends up losing that job over something out of her control, she would then have the time on her hands for a run at the Senate seat held by McCain.
And while the Republican blogosphere in AZ hates John McCain with a fiery passion, something tells me they'd hate the idea of "Senator Napolitano" even more.
BTW - I'm not exactly Napolitano's biggest fan. Hindsight being 20/20, she *never* should have left AZ. While the state would still face the same fiscal crisis, I firmly believe that "Governor Napolitano" would have done a far better job of wrangling the legislature into fiscal sanity than "Governor Brewer" has.
5 comments:
The governor can only sign or veto a bill the legislature passes. She might have inspired a more strident chorus for a tax hike referral but in the end it is up to the legislature.
Even if bloggers with Democratic sympathies chose to overlook a certain abdication of office I don't see 51% of the voters of Arizona succumbing to such a tendency. I can just imagine John McCain (or J.D. Hayworth) supporters posting this when discussing the general election.
51% of Arizona voters aren't Losertarians and don't have Losertarian sympathies. If you want to disprove this, have Ernie Hancock or the Losertarian of your choice run against McCain. He or she would lose badly which is why they won't do it.
As much as I'm pissed about Nappy's abdicating her office, she still is the best hope for beating McCain.
Thane -
My point about her doing better than Brewer is that she is far smarter than Brewer and a more capable political tactician.
In any meeting with the leadership of the lege, she was usually the smartest one in the room, and it showed.
Brewer is smarter than she has looked so far, but she's not in the same intellectual weight class as Napolitano.
Napolitano was too much a DLC Democrat (in Big Business' pocket) for my taste, but she was very effective as Governor of AZ.
And yet anybody who donated or voted for Janet Napolitano ended up contributing to Brewer for Governor campaign. If I had voted for her I would feel a bit burned.
I am looking forward to more Napolitano skits on SNL.
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