By Ronald Sampson
Photo Credit: azcentral.com
I am loathe to draw too many conclusions from Twitter; it is generally a cesspool which is not reflective of real life in nearly any way, after all. But if volume of responses are indicative of anything, then local Dems have en masse tipped their hands as to their lack of moral and ethical rooting in the face of bad behavior.
We have covered the malfeasance of Jann-Michael Greenburg and his father Mark on this blog previously. You would think it would be hard for Democrats to be perfectly fine with white men stalking women and collecting extremely intrusive and personal information on them for the purposes of building a dossier (last I know, dossiers typically aren’t used to send them the perfect Christmas gift). And yet on Twitter, you would have thought that the Greenburgs were folk heroes in a simple misunderstanding. Liberal-looking Twitter profiles came out in force to justify their intrusion.
Perhaps even more stunning is the rabid defense of Katie Hobbs. Especially since the George Floyd murder, equal rights for blacks has been a cause de celebre for the Democratic party, and when combined with their long-standing stance on gender pay, Hobbs’s actions against Talonya Adams had to spark a serious revolt, right? Wrong.
When the judgment for Talonya Adams came through and unequivocally demonstrated that Katie Hobbs and her aides had discriminated against a black woman, the denizens of Arizona’s liberal Twitter came out in full support of Hobbs, with few defections. When journalists such Laurie Roberts, Elvia Diaz, and EJ Montini (none of them conservative rabblerousers) demonstrated their outrage, with some of them calling for her to drop out, the Twitter Mob turned against them with insults and anger. Most interesting were the repeated references to Kari Lake, as if Hobbs was the only option they had in the Democratic primary. Raquel Teran, then-Chair of the Arizona Democratic Party, gave a vague statement about pay equity without even mentioning Hobbs by name or implying her existence within the issue.
Last election cycle, it certainly felt like the Dems were one trick ponies in Arizona: education funding, education funding, and education funding. As the national party demonstrates the priorities of the progressive sphere, the local party was happy to give lip service to other issues but only prioritized education, to their detriment. Now perhaps we know why: they simply don’t care.
To get people to want to get involved in campaigns and the political process, you have to stand for something. The local Democratic establishment has demonstrated that the only issue that they care about is not losing. And what the positive consequences of their not-losing would be, who knows, because they stand for nothing else. As far as messaging to elicit interest, theirs is a very poor value proposition, and will likely be a significant yet unspoken reason why they are unlikely to make any electoral gains.