Le Templar's goodbye column
The opinion pages editor is leaving the EVT to join the Goldwater Institute.
Loyal Tribune readers know of the newspaper’s challenges over the past year — the switch in January 2009 from a metro daily to a community paper with a smaller staff, company bankruptcy in September, the Nov. 2 announcement of a pending closure followed a couple of weeks later by a proposed sale that has yet to be completed.
Today, I have a great deal of hope for the Tribune’s future. But I won’t be there in the Mesa newsroom to see what happens next. I am taking advantage of a rare opportunity to join the staff of the Goldwater Institute, a public policy institution (what reporters used to call a political think tank) that shares the vision and values that the Tribune’s editorial pages have pursued with vigor for so long.
7:06 PM
PHXations, January 12, 2010
update: Another journalist move: Le Templar, the East Valley Tribune’s opinion page editor and political blogger, is moving to the Goldwater Institute, where he will be communications director. He’d been with the EVT 10 years.
Last week, the paper’s editor, Chris Coppola, anounced that he will be joining the Arizona Republic as an suburban editor.
The EVT was headed for closure at the end of the year until it was said that a company called Thirteenth Street Media, led by Randy Miller, had agreed to buy it. The end of the year came and went only with an announcement that negotiations were continuing.
Rene Gutel, the local radio reporter, is leaving town to join … the foreign service.
My family goes to Washington in February for 4-12 months of training, then to be deployed to an embassy somewhere in the world, exact locale TBD! I’m terribly excited. This is the dream job I’ve always wanted going way back to high school so I couldn’t be more thrilled.
Gutel dropped out of graduate school at Berkeley, where she was studying Andalusian poetry, to take up radio reporting. She’s been with KJZZ since 2004. She had her first child, a boy, a few months ago, too.
For Third Friday, the Heard has a series of events tonight. The first is “Changing Direction: A Conversation on Transitions and Influences in the Now.” It starts at 6 p.m. Cochran’s the PAM’s head contemporary curator; the panel includes artists Bob Haozus and Nora Naranjo Morse. There will be a performance by soprano Jennifer Stevens at 8 p.m. as well. It’s free.
7:00 AM
How will Arizona's House delegation do in the 2010 elections?
(Update below.)
Over at 538.com, Tom Shaller has posted an overview of the most vulnerable Democratic House seats in 2010. The site doesn’t do on-the-ground political analysis so much as crunch numbers and assess macro factors like fund-raising.
In this case, Shaller took numbers on the races from the Cook Political Report and then added a few factors. In all, they included: The rep’s votes on health care and cap and trade; the traditional political nature of their districts; their most recent win margin; and the cash on hand they and their potential opponents have.
The bad news for Arizona Democrats is that two local House seats by these measures look vulnerable. Indeed, Harry Mitchell, of the Arizona fifth, is one of the nine most vulnerable across the country.
Gabrielle Giffords, from the eighth, is one of fifteen members on the next-most-vulnerable tier.
Their districts are superficially similar, with urban anchors in the affluent eastern parts of Phoenix and Tucson, respectively.
The Cook report is a very sophisticated operation (as 538.com is as well); I’d just make one observation that neither seems to have noted in the case of these two races; that the Arizona Republican vote in 2008 was skewed because of McCain’s favorite-son status.
McCain got less than 52 percent of the vote in Mitchell’s district, and just above 52 percent in Giffords’. It seems arguable that both would have gone at least slightly Democratic were anyone else running on the GOP side.
That said, the 2010 campaigns will be run in a much different political climate, and one without the energized folks who came out for Obama. Both parties are prepared for significant Democratic losses next year, and it’s possible two of them will come from Arizona.
For a GOP perspective on the race in the eighth, Greg Petterson points to the recent deposing of a longtime Democratic city council person in Tucson and offers this assessment:
When you are trying assess how Tuesday’s election will affect the 2010 race, remember that Tucson is the Democratic core of Gabby Gifford’s district. Yet, if the election were held today, Giffords would have to struggle to win an election in Tucson itself. Add back the Republican portions of the district and CD 8 is looking like solid Republican territory.
p.s. : As I noted above, the 538.com analysis wasn’t on-the-ground political prognosticating. It was all about crunching the numbers. Here’s the EVT’s Le Templar, who is on the ground, on an Arizona House race that didn’t get the blog’s attention:
The vice president is raising money today for one incumbent not included on that most-vulnerable list: Ann Kirkpatrick. The Congressional District 1 race is flying under the radar because Democrats have more registered voters and Kirkpatrick’s potential challengers haven’t raised much money, yet. But the district is quite conservative and Kirkpatrick won her first term in the fallout from former Rep. Rick Renzi’s criminal indictment for political corruption. There’s also this video where Kirkpatrick literally walked out of a meeting with her constituents. Expect that video to get a lot of air time and blogger references in the coming year.
My guess is Kirkpatrick will be at least as vulnerable as Mitchell and Giffords next year.
Arizona’s polity is obviously in a state of upheaval from top to bottom, and as it moved from red-state to swing-state status there will certainly be volatility. But speaking generally about the Democrats from the national perspective, it strikes me that what too often isn’t noticed is that bad times for the Democrats and the new president came conveniently early.
Just a year from the election the country seems to have hit bottom. The health-care debate and unemployment are still drags, of course. (And might turn out to be game-changers on their own if they are not resolved by next summer.)
Still, it’s an odd advantage, but an advantage nonetheless, that the party has a year to deal with the problems rather than a period of months or even weeks. That they might be resolved during that time is a possibility that is too-infrequently raised, I think.
7:29 PM
Joe Biden is in town today
Republic report here.
During a visit to Phoenix Monday morning, Vice President Joe Biden praised the federal stimulus for its early effects in Arizona and reminded state Democrats how well the economy has already responded.
“Only 12 states have gotten more money obligated than the state of Arizona has,” Biden said of the state’s $5 billion in federal aid.
Biden spoke to several dozen supporters at the downtown Wyndham Phoenix Hotel, where he attended a fundraiser for Democratic Reps. Ann Kirkpatrick and Harry Mitchell.
Emphasis added. Biden’s words are a reminder that Arizona, for all the states-rights bravado spouted by its Republican political representatives, is one of those states who get a lot more back from the U.S. Government than it puts it.
(Indeed, with the exception of Washington D.C., virtually all the whiny traditional “red states” benefit from taxes in this way. Details here—with an easy-to-comprehend map—and here.)
Le Templar, in the EVT, notes the political aims of the visit:
Vice President Joe Biden is in Arizona this morning, trying to build support for the White House economic stimulus efforts and attending a fundraiser for some Democrats in the state’s delegation to the U.S. House of Representatives. Biden’s visit coincides with a growing national consensus that Reps. Harry Mitchell and Gabrielle Giffords could be especially at risk to a national shift in voter sentiment back to the Republican Party.
12:00 AM