Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio nearly lost the 2012 race to veteran Phoenix policeman Paul Penzone, who was endorsed by nearly every sane person and organization in the state. Arpaio barely squeaked by with little more than 50 percent of the vote in 2012, and he'd never have a chance if it weren't for Sun City and similar retirement bubbles on the fringes of the county, full of scared white people from Iowa or wherever, who moved here two years ago and now want to tell natives how to run the place. In downtown Phoenix, for instance, Arpaio didn't even receive 20 percent of the vote, which was true in most other urban centers. It also helped that Arpaio outspent Penzone 10-1, a war chest the sheriff's very professional, and expensive, fund-raising machine milked from hundreds of thousands of bigots nationwide.
Before Paul Penzone, the opponent most Arpaio watchers remember is Dan Saban, the former respected Buckeye Police Chief who ran against the sheriff in 2004 and 2008 (Buckeye is a distant suburb of Phoenix). Again, Saban had a very good record as a law official, and he came within 5 points of upsetting Arpaio both times, but in the end the frightened blue hairs, Arpaio's hefty war chest and a series of slimy ads undid Saban, who just announced he'll run in the upcoming Democratic primary for the chance to go up against Joe Arpaio in 2016.
"I've dedicated my life to this for 12 years... to bring him down," Saban said in an interview Wednesday. "I'm exactly the opposite of this guy."
By "opposite of this guy," Saban means he won't run a racist racket and call it a police force; he means he'll crack down on real crime, not send SWAT teams to arrest teenagers washing cars or mowing lawns; he means he'll obey court orders instead of trying to create his own sovereign fiefdom answerable to no one; he means he won't use his office to intimidate elected officials and journalists; he means county residents won't have to fork over tens of millions of dollars in settlements for his unconstitutional fuck-ups. In other words, he'll bring honor and respect to the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, something that's been missing since 1993.
Sheriff Arpaio isn't nearly the political force he was during the last four elections, when Republican officials bent every way possible to kiss his corrupt arse. If legislators, judges, journalists and everyday citizens didn't pucker up, they knew Arpaio might indict, arrest, investigate or otherwise harass them for not kowtowing to his police state tactics.
That period, from about 2008 to 2012, the "Age of Papers Please," when Gov. Jan Brewer, Senate President Russell Pearce, County Attorney Andrew Thomas and Sheriff Joe Arpaio were ringmasters of the racist circus, was as bleak as they come. Arizona's economy, which is built on housing, suffered more than any other state during the recession, so of course assholes like Sen. Pearce called upon their racism to invent a convenient scapegoat for Wall Street's crimes: Latinos! The result: SB 1070 in 2010.
Russell Pearce was recalled in 2011 and Andrew Thomas was disbarred in 2012. Now the sheriff is getting his comeuppance.
Last year Arpaio was convicted of racial profiling in the Melendres case; this summer he was found guilty of contempt of court, a hearing that continues and could land his butt in the pokey; and a DOJ investigation of abuse of powers is about to get underway in August. Just last week federal marshals raided the sheriff's office to confiscate hard drives and 1,500 other pieces of evidence to prepare for the DOJ trail. This is serious shit. It's even been suggested that Joe Arpaio, who currently has a 38 percent favorability rating locally, might not win the GOP primary this year!
A cornered rat is a more vicious rat and Dan Saban knows this, which is why he and his family are bracing for more outlandish attack ads if a wounded Arpaio wins the GOP primary. Take, for instance, this fine ad from 2008:
You got that right: rape, exposing himself to children and that old favorite, burping the worm on company time. As you might imagine, none of this was true. The rape allegation goes back to a rumor that Saban raped his foster mother when he was a child, which wasn't true. It never happened and after the 2008 election Saban sued Arpaio for using it in the ad.
For some reason (projection much?) during another civil hearing Arpaio's attorney asked Saban if he had ever jerked off while on duty. He said he had—once, at home, when he was 18. No one else in the history of the world has ever done that. Saban's problem is that his confession ended up in a political ad 30 years later.
That hit piece was so outrageous that, like LBJ's "Daisy" ad, it only ran once. TV stations were flooded with furious calls the night it aired, even from Republicans. And then AG Terry Goddard started to look into this "Arizonans for Public Safety" group that funded the spot. Who the heck were they?
It turns out the sheriff's flunkies, notably Deputy Sheriff David Hendershott, who has since been fired for all kinds of nasty shit, created a rightwing slush fund to support Arpaio—big donors, lotsa money, clearly illegal. This "Sheriff's Command Association," as the fund was called, made a $100,000 donation to the Arizona Republican Party, which laundered the money to Arizonans for Public Safety, who used the cash to make the masturbation ad. I'll wait if you want to go shower.
Targeting PAC funds to support a single candidate was illegal, but new Attorney General Tom Horne, who owed his political career to SB 1070 and Arpaio's anti-immigrant nonsense, chose not to prosecute. It's shit like this, doing ugly favors for uglier friends, that eventually got Horne bounced from the 2014 GOP primary.
So this is what Dan Saban and other challengers have to look forward to in the 2016 election: criminal, slimy accusations. But then "criminal" and "slimy" pretty much sums up Sheriff Arpaio's entire career.