Bennett should exit the governor’s race
Ken Bennett needs to get out of the governor’s race.
Not because he poses a serious challenge to incumbent Doug Ducey in the Republican primary.
He doesn’t.
Not because he would damage fellow Republican Ducey before the general election.
He won’t.
He needs to get out to save himself, to save what’s left of brand Bennett.
His late and haphazard entry into the race was strange enough. He showed up only after Ducey had proposed a 20percent pay raise for Arizona publicschool teachers. And he railed against it. He promised he had a sustainable way to grant that raise.
Bennett had obviously done no planning to run for chief executive of the state. His only plan seemed to be to parachute in and improvise.
Well, improvisation ain’t working. His tweet Thursday and self-avowed oath to never appoint Cindy McCain to her dying husband’s U.S. Senate seat was callous and mean.
That’s not Ken Bennett. Bennett is behaving like an insurgent, a Trump-inspired destroyer of the Republican establishment, and that’s pure fraud.
Bennett is as establishment as it gets in Arizona. If anything, he would often swim to the center when he was in the Legislature, willing to work with Democrats when the hard-core in his party were shunning them.
He has been a fiscal conservative and a longtime voice for common sense and comity, a leader of real warmth and decency when serving on West Washington Street.
The first inkling that he was going awry was his silly dabble into birtherism when he was secretary of state. In 2012 he asked the state of Hawaii to verify the information in then-President Obama’s birth certificate.
Why that was any business of the Arizona secretary of state was lost on many. And it seemed then beneath Bennett -- a repudiation of his own and, until-then, steady good judgment. Outrage followed.
The birth certificate matter was seen as a craven play for the Republican base. Bennett was then running for governor in 2014.
But the larger public and media rebuked him and Bennett demurred. “If I embarrassed the state, I apologize.”
It seemed a momentary lapse into the fever swamps.
But now six years later here comes Krazy Ken again.
And that’s why Bennett needs to get out of the race. Because he’s not crazy and if he keeps working without a script he’s going to dig himself deeper.
His tweet was not only contemptuous, beneath him in all ways, but it was politically stupid.
McCain is still very popular in this state. In 2016, when Donald Trump was winning the Arizona general election by 3.5 points over Hillary Clinton, McCain was beating Ann Kirkpatrick by 13 points. McCain got 100,000 more votes than Trump.
Also, there is enormous sympathy for the McCain family today with what they’re enduring. To try to score grubby political points on their tragedy is base and low.
You could measure the magnitude of Bennett’s mistake by the intensity with which Ducey and the Republican Party answered.
“Indecent, embarrassing and revealing,” said the governor in an interview on KTAR News.
“(His words) say more about the person who said them than I ever could...”
State GOP Party Chairman Jonathan Lines was more harsh. “Regardless of your personal feelings towards the McCains this type of attack has zero place in our party or our state, you’ve disqualified yourself from leading our state.”
Ken Bennett’s “Cindy McCain” oath plays to the anti-McCain party zealots who believe the senator (or his wife, for that matter) is too liberal to represent Arizona. They also thought Jeff Flake and Jon Kyl were too liberal. They don’t represent the rank-and-file Republicans who routinely returned these guys to office year after year.
The only thing that explains Bennett’s strange run for governor is something that explains a lot of politicians. They’re needy. They reach a point when they’ve been too long from the spotlight and they crave its white glare.
This campaign feels like that. Like vanity.
It also feels like Ken Bennett’s last.