:Carl Hayden
Posted inPhoenix 101: History Politics: Arizona/Phoenix Politics: National

:Carl Hayden

Young_Carl_haydenThis week, Sen. Robert Byrd will surpass Arizona's Carl Hayden as the longest-serving member of Congress. As Arizona's only congressman and later its fixture of a senator, Hayden was there for 56 years. The Arizona Republic's Dan Nowicki provides a good primer on Hayden for the majority of Arizonans who have either never heard of him, or merely associate his name with a high school.

When he was alive, Hayden was the most prominent of the walking reminders of Arizona as a frontier state. He had been born when the Salt River Valley was barely settled, had chased outlaws on horseback as Maricopa County sheriff (above left), then had become the Baby State's first representative in Congress.

"Ol' Carl Hayden," as he was known by the time I was alive, will forever be associated with the Central Arizona Project. The best book on Hayden and the CAP is my friend Jack August's Vision in the Desert. It was his life's work, and as it headed toward victory, Hayden realized it would not mean the sustenance and extension of agriculture in the Salt River Valley, but rather its transformation into a megalopolis. I have heard he was ambivalent about this reality, as many who fought for the CAP came to be. Ironically, many of the sustainability issues Phoenix and the Southwest face today were made in the 1950s and 1960s by the CAP adversaries in California — although they were hardly angels.

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Posted inPolitics: National

Jesse Helms, RIP

Former Sen. Jesse Helms died on July 4, and the first inclination might be to ask, "He was still alive?," for he seems so removed from our times. This former television commentator who served 30 years in the Senate, was known mostly for his uncompromising and untelegenic opposition to nearly everything, especially communism and liberalism.

Surely National Review Online, the child of Bill Buckley, would bring some deeper perspectives, or so I thought. He was, the editors wrote, "one of the most consequential conservatives of his generation." They went on:

It is easy to rattle off a long list of what Senator No opposed. First
and foremost was Communism. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee, he was an aggressive and outspoken critic of the Soviet
Union. He refused to overlook the evils of Fidel Castro’s regime in
Cuba. During the 1980s, he led efforts to support Nicaragua’s contra
rebels against the Sandinistas and their incipient totalitarianism.

He
was against many other things as well: federal funding of obscene art,
ineffective aid to foreign governments, and the continual encroachments
of Big Government on everyday life. One of the things he was against in
the 1960s was, alas, civil rights. His defense of segregation was of
course deeply misguided. But is it fair for this error to have been
placed in the first sentence of the New York Times’s obituary of him? Certainly liberals have forgiven the pasts of other segregationists, from Sam Ervin to William Fulbright…

One might ask, who in either party was for communism? Also, Ervin and Fulbright went on to do heroic service in saving the Constitution from imperial presidents, and in any case, their early positions on civil rights have been well documented. But Helms was a generation or more younger than these men yet had learned nothing. He became a Republican representing North Carolina and helped turn the white South to the GOP with both subtle and overt calls to racism. He succeeded beautifully. But even here, he would have failed had not Lyndon Johnson championed civil rights, handing the South to the Republicans for, in his formula, "a generation." Or more.

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Posted inPhoenix Politics: National

John McCain, you’re no Barry Goldwater

I’m probably the wrong one to ask for an objective comparison between Barry Goldwater and John McCain. I’ll always love Barry, despite the flaws and misjudgments that were as big as his accomplishments. Attending Kenilworth School in Phoenix — where Barry himself had gone years before — I remember being one of only two kids with the guts to wear Goldwater buttons in 1964. Such was the power of LBJ. But I loved Barry, even at age seven.

Nearly everyone attests to, at best, an arm’s length relationship between the aging Goldwater and the newcomer McCain. John Dean and Barry Goldwater Jr. have a new book that looks at a true "maverick from Arizona." Although McCain brags about being a "Goldwater Republican," younger Goldwater family members are having none of it. Granddaughter Alison Goldwater told the Huffington Post, that Barry felt "deceived" by McCain. She says,  "I’m sure if we were to raise his ashes from the Colorado River…he would be going, ‘What? This is not my vision. This is not my party.’ "

McCain is an opportunist where Barry never was. McCain lands in scandals — from the Keating Five to the latest property tax oops — that Barry never would have contemplated. If McCain has principles aside from orthodox 1990s right-wing politics, with an occasional tilt to please the national press, I can’t find them. Most of all, Barry was an Arizonan. He loved Arizona deeply, personally. Starting as a Phoenix City Councilman, he supported every bond issue to make the city better (his name used to be on the plaque at the old library, simply listed as a city council member). He was a true conservationist.

Yet McCain-as-Goldwater isn’t another campaign distraction. It’s a topic worth debate and contemplation, one that says much about the trajectory of America over the past 45 years.

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