Literally volumes have been written about the disloyalty shown toward the Democratic party by two senators. One, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, never really marketed himself as a firebrand liberal. Calling himself a West Virginia Democrat, which likely just means allegiance to the fossil fuel industry, we can’t be terribly surprised that he is reticent to be a change agent on climate.
Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, however, is different. Once a vocal advocate for the Green Party, and eventually the Democrats, as Tim Murphy of Mother Jones points out she once made this statement, related to Joe Lieberman:
Few moments illustrate so perfectly the personal and political evolution of Arizona’s junior senator. When Sinema was first becoming active in state politics as a lefty political activist—she ran as a Green Party member and as an independent before finally joining the Democratic fold—she viewed Lieberman as the embodiment of Washington sellouts. As I reported in a profile of Sinema for the magazine, Sinema even protested outside of a Lieberman campaign event when the senator was running for president in 2003.
“He’s a shame to Democrats,” she told a reporter from the Hartford Courant at the time. “I don’t even know why he’s running. He seems to want to get Republicans voting for him—what kind of strategy is that?” Lieberman, she added, was “pathetic.”
This does not sound like someone who would eventually win a Senate seat as a Democrat only to be a thorn in her own party’s side. So what happened? Theories abound, with the most popular ones seeming to be positioning herself for a lucrative gig as a lobbyist or perhaps as an analyst on Fox News when her Senate career, that most assume will only be one term, ends.
And while it has been said she models herself to be a maverick, like the late Arizona Senator John McCain, she has failed to keep the ties necessary in her own party to maintain a path forward politically. It is hard to imagine a scenario where she, for example, takes the Democratic nomination for President, as Senator McCain did as a Republican in his loss to then Senator Barack Obama in 2008.
From the Daily Beast-
“A lot of people who have considered her a friend, or confidant, or someone she’d go to for donor support or political support, she won’t talk to those people anymore,” said Matt Grodsky, a former communications director for the Democratic Party of Arizona.
“She had a big network of people who liked her—establishment Democrats, progressives—everyone marveled at her ability to win in Arizona,” said one Democratic strategist in the state. “A lot of her longtime friends and confidants are no longer there. No one knows, to be honest, where she’s at.”
But perhaps most illuminating her enormous sense of self, which is potentially her greatest weakness, she with just two words consistently demonstrates both a lack of maturity and a stunningly huge ego, when asked this question:
..When people ask Kyrsten Sinema if she wants to run for president someday, the Arizona senator usually has a stock answer: “I’m overqualified.”
As a Senator that has been showing tremendous disrespect to President Biden, she is demonstrating herself to lack the seriousness of an adult necessary to discharge the duties of her office.
That she likely believes she is overqualified shows just how naive she is about the responsibilities of the highest office. Clearly, nobody knows the exact workings of her mind, but her every action lately shows that she also believes she is intellectually superior to her old allies and aides and friends.
Two Senators are currently holding President Biden’s agenda, and by extension the hopes to combat climate change, hostage. One of them is a serious professional, however maddening he might be. Another is in love with herself and is prone to fits of juvenile rebellion.
It seems Kyrsten Sinema loving herself some Kyrsten Sinema is the only thing she is actually qualified, to do.
It is after all, what appears to be her best talent.
-ROC
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-ROC