Most of the nation outside Arizona first met him in the 2010 John McCain “Complete the Danged Fence” election ad, which went viral for the senator’s sheer hypocrisy and boot-licking.
During the primary Sen. McCain was being attacked from the knuckle-dragging tea party wing of the Arizona GOP, which can be dominant here (they’re at it again this year). Sen. McCain’s primary opponent was former congressman J.D. Hayworth, who we often called Foghorn Leghorn because he had that manner: big, boisterous, loud and usually wrong.
Hayworth stood shoulder-to-shoulder with the sizable Russell Pearce mob of meanies — the militia nutballs, Oathkeepers, Breitbart boobs and other racists who attacked the state’s senior senator mostly on immigration. So during the campaign you never heard McCain talk about immigration “reform,” as he once had, and he ran ads like this:
The sheriff who’s walking along the fence of iron studs with McCain is Paul Babeu of Pinal County, which is a hundred miles or more from the border. But of course distance and lack of jurisdictional oversight doesn’t stop Joe Arpaio either, whose county is even farther from the border.
So, Sheriff Babeu is running for congress again. He probably shouldn’t. Every time he announces, a sensationalized bizarro story explodes in the news, undermining his campaign and doing his reputation no favors. If I knew I had a back story like his, I’d keep my head down because, with all the opposition research during a campaign, the bad shit is bound to come out. And apparently he has piles of it.
Early on the recent transplant from Massachusetts, who arrived in Arizona in 2002, went about getting his name in the headlines after he was elected Pinal County Sheriff in 2008, by positioning himself as Arpaio-in-waiting: hardcore rightwing immigration BS — cruel, racist and counterproductive (check the WSJ’s front page this week for the terrible results of SB 1070). Like the Arpaio-Pearce looney brigade, Babeu talked about most immigrants as drug runners, rapists or home invaders, which sometimes led to his deputies murdering the wrong people while fighting his crackpot Drug-Mexican War.
Leading up to the 2012 election, then, Babeu couldn’t have been more anti-immigration generally and anti-Latino specifically, a bonus in his conservative district. At the peak of SB 1070’s popularity among wingers, he was even tapped to serve as co-chair of Mitt Romney’s Arizona team.
Then right after Sheriff Babeu announced for the congressional seat in District 4, his buffed Adam4Adam gay website photo was everywhere, after it was revealed he had an undocumented boyfriend, Jose Orozco. Gulp! But it gets worse for the “law and order” candidate because Babeu was allegedly blackmailing Orozco with a deportation threat, to keep their relationship secret in the very rightwing district. His campaign, built on fighting “illegal immigration,” took on water and tanked fast. Needless to say, Mitt Romney found another co-chair for Arizona.
Babeu went back to being sheriff, until last year, when he announced another run for congress in 2016, as a gay-rights Republican. At first it wasn’t clear if he had actually filed to run, or if he had registered in the right district. KPHO-TV reported that Babeu did not file until Dec. 31, more than two months after the law requires. Then the sheriff realized he filed in the wrong district and had to amend the report. Oops.
But a “paperwork error,” which is how Babeu’s team described the snafu, is far from his Big Problem this year. No, just like the threat of deporting his undocumented lover tanked Babeu’s 2012 candidacy, another smarmy part of his history will likely do the same this year.
ABC15’s exhaustive investigation, “Abusing the Truth,” turned up video of Paul Babeu extolling the virtues of inhumane punishment at the DeSisto School in Massachusetts, a boarding school where he served as headmaster from 1999 until 2001. When initially confronted with allegations from students and former staff that the school inflicted overly abusive punishment, Babeu denied any knowledge of the wrong-doing.
But a never-before-seen home video proves that Babeu not only knew about the abusive discipline, he praised it and even bragged about it.
Education experts who’ve studied conditions at DeSisto call the abuse “torture,” and of course Babeu’s opponents have pounced on the story. Meanwhile, Sheriff Babeu’s campaign chair, Sen. Steve Smith (the wackjob who tried to build a border fence with donations), says he “stands by” his man. With a team like that …
We only have to wait until 2018 to see what other skeletons are in Babeu’s very big closet.