In an election season where Democratic strategists are rightly worried about the Democratic base being less energized than its conservative counterpart, the State of Arizona is the gift that will keep on giving.
It is an inherent fact that it is far easier--if less high-minded--to motivate voters by appealing to their fear and their anger than it is to reach the better angels of their nature. Still, that pesky intensity gap staring Democratic candidates in the face is often puzzling: Especially in the wake of the improbable signing into law of health insurance reform, Democrats have been able to put together an impressive laundry list of accomplishments on a wide variety of fronts that may soon include Wall Street reform.
When viewed in combination with pulling this country back from the brink of a fiscal collapse not paralleled since the Great Depression, it may have seemed like this tangible list of accomplishments would be enough to motivate Democrats to ensure that President Obama would finish his first time with a Congress that was at least mildly cooperative. And this may have been the case, were it not for the crushing weight of expectations. By now, many in the progressive base had expected that Obama would have disentangled us militarily from Afghanistan and Iraq, passed health insurance reform with a strong public option, signed into law ENDA, the ERA and a repeal of DADT, and implemented stringent reforms on the financial sector, including the reinstatement of Glass-Steagall. No matter the issue, he was supposed to have done it by now.
But as the philosopher Mick Jagger once said: you can't always get what you want. Consequently, enthusiasm is muted among the Progressive base, which now seems to believe that Obama has only been moderately successful at best and a sellout at worst. The conservative base, on the other hand, has been thoroughly convinced that Obama has already brought CommuNazism to America, and if he continues unabated for two more years, it will mean the end of American life as we know it and the Presidential motorcade will refashion itself Transformer-style into mechanized horsemen of the apocalypse.
Nothing the Democrats could have done from now through November would have been able to reverse these numbers. Simply put, the side that feverishly believes the end of America is knocking at the doorstep will always be more intense than the one that is operating under the constraints of actual reality. But along came Arizona and SB1070.
While it may initially seem somewhat callous to discuss in a simply political context a law that will allow racial profiling and institutionalize discrimination by law enforcement, it's worth noting that SB1070 is in and of itself extremely political. It's no accident that when Governor Jan Brewer was Arizona's Secretary of State, she seems to have led a systematic purge of Latino voters. It's hard to think of a more effective way to suppress the Democratic-leaning Latino vote than to make Latinos afraid to leave their homes without carrying papers.
But from a purely political standpoint outside of Arizona, SB1070 could not have come at a better time. Frontrunning candidates in contested Republican primaries who had attempted to maintain a moderate label for general elections, such as Tom Campbell in California's Senate race, are now having to run to the right in support of SB1070 because they know that if they do not, they will have no chance at gaining enough conservative support to get them out of the primary, which will damage their general election chances in purple or blue states. And Latinos in Arizona and across the country are already realizing which party welcomes them and which one doesn't.
But while SB1070 may be the largest part of Arizona's very bad couple of weeks, it's not the only one. Under Jan Brewer's leadership, Arizona started the trifecta last fall by rescinding domestic partnership benefits for state employees, and completed it last Tuesday by making Arizona the first state in the nation to restrict abortion coverage in the new insurance exchanges.
Under Jan Brewer's leadership, Arizona has become the Tea Party State: institutionalizing systematic discrimination against ethnic minorities, the GLBT community, and women. This unique confluence, combined with the media firestorm over SB1070 specifically, can allow Democrats nationwide to stop haggling for votes on the basis of having passed a laundry list of a dozen bills, but rather on a much more simple and emotionally compelling narrative about radically contrasting visions for what this country should look like. Arizona, the home of the 2008 Republican Presidential candidate, has laid out the conservative case for 2010. It's now up to the Democrats to offer a higher bid to the American people.