By Alexander Lomax
Photo Credit: NBC News
In politics, “one and done” is almost universally a negative. Never in my lifetime has a President chosen not to run for re-election after their first term save the emergency scramble to pressure Biden not to, so a “one-term President” means electoral failure. A one-term Congressman barely has enough time to ditch a map of the building before they’re sent back home. But a one-term Senator had six years to carve their path and leave their legacy; far from insignificant.
So as Senator Kyrsten Sinema is set to leave the Senate in the next few days, what has her legacy been? I think it’s one of potential promise squandered. Of a bait-and-switch.
In Arizona, independence is cherished. It is a state founded by people who took a massive risk with an entrepreneurial spirit. A state that has consistently gone against the grain. And a state whose biggest “political party” is unaffiliated. Our Senators have a long history of challenging traditional party dynamics, from Goldwater to McCain. And Sinema said all the right things to imply that she would be the next iteration of this tradition.
However there is a difference between saying that you’re independent and actual independence. A difference between standing up to leadership because of the political optics and doing so for moral reasons. Sinema mastered the former, not the latter.
The warning signs came early and often. After all, this was a former Green party activist who when she arrived in Congress, she was placed on the House Financial Services Committee. Following that, essentially any vote that came up that had the chance to benefit or hurt either the big banks or large financial institutions, she voted in favor of those institutions. Without family. She may not have been strictly beholden to a party, but she was certainly strictly beholden.
While her time in the Senate may best be seen as a Rorschach painting that is open to the end observer’s interpretation, I see her biggest selling point as nothing more than a selling point. Her obsession was with image, and the biggest aspect of that image was “independent”, wrapped in a cloak of perfectly crafted style, a seemingly concerted push to get as much attention as possible. The end result was the appearance of 100% Style, 0% Substance, with “Independent” coming off as a hollow mantra with absolutely no weight behind it other than a signal that her vote was very important and that the bid should be high.
And her tenure ended in a vacuous pinnacle. She has missed about 1/3rd of her votes in the last month, but has managed to rack up nearly 1/4th of a million of dollars worth of campaign-funded luxury trips internationally. Nothing quite perfectly states that it was never, ever about public service and always about self-serving than skipping your votes to go to a 5-star hotel in the UK.
Arizona deserves leaders that actually exemplify that spirit of independence that we cherish, not those that dangle it in front of our face and then humiliate us by slapping us in the face with it. Good riddance to Kyrsten Sinema.