Ducey, Bennett spar for first and likely only time
In what will likely be their only faceto-face discussion of policy issues before the Republican primary election, Gov. Doug Ducey and his challenger, former Secretary of State Ken Bennett, exchanged polite verbal jabs Friday during a meeting with editorial board.
The two discussed the fate of the U.S. Senate seat held by John McCain, who is fighting brain cancer. It is the issue that Ducey had said invalidated Bennett as a candidate and made him unworthy of a debate.
Ducey has declined to debate Bennett at two forums next week: one co-hosted by and Arizona PBS, and another sponsored by the Clean Elections Commission.
Bennett, in a Tweet sent in May, said that he would not appoint Cindy McCain, the wife of Arizona’s senior senator, to the seat should it become vacant.
Ducey reiterated on Friday that Bennett’s remark was out of bounds.
“Have you ever seen anything more disgraceful than the way Ken Bennett has handled the issue?” he said to the editorial board. “I think it is very revealing and embarrassing.”
Ducey said Bennett has been quoted saying he raised the issue “because it has political advantage to him.”
Bennett said that he did not mean to disrespect McCain. He said he was travelling from Prescott to Phoenix and heard stories on the radio that reported a deal had already been struck that would have Ducey appointing Cindy McCain to the seat. He said he sent the Tweet responding to those stories.
“I just don’t believe our U.S. Senate positions are family heirlooms,” Bennett said.
Bennett said he was pulling for Sen. McCain to recover, mentioning that his own father was diagnosed with cancer around the time McCain was. “I did not intend that as disrespect to McCain in any way,” he said.
On Thursday, and again Friday, Bennett posted on Twitter that McCain had not been heard from in person for 221 days and urged him to resign, saying Arizona needed two active Senators.
“Step up to the mic or step down Senator,” he wrote.
Bennett repeated his assertion that McCain voted no on the so-called “skinny repeal” of the Affordable Care Act under orders from Ducey. It is an allegation disputed by news stories at the time and in McCain’s most recent memoir released this year.
in a fact check, also rated the story as false.
Bennett said that McCain had, in the days leading up to the vote, asserted he would vote after consulting with Ducey.
On the night of the vote, McCain was on a conference call that included Ducey. In McCain’s book, “The Restless Wave,” he described how Ducey urged him to vote yes on the procedural bill to keep the repeal possibility alive.
“I advocated for a yes vote,” Ducey said on Friday. “And he, as a senator — it’s his vote — decided to vote no.”
Bennett said he had not read that McCain wrote about the call. He suggested that he may have done so to provide political cover for Ducey.
While Ducey’s camp has refused to debate Bennett, both men accepted the invitation to meet with the editorial board. The board, as is tradition, interviews candidates before making an endorsement.
The editorial board and the newsroom operate independently of each other.
In other matters, Bennett said the statewide teacher walkout came about because educators didn’t trust Ducey.
Bennett said that after Ducey passed Proposition 123, a measure that tapped into the state land trust to boost education funding, educators were told more steps would be taken.
Bennett said the next step was a proposal of a pay raise of 2 percent doled out over five years, which the governor proposed in his 2017 state of the state speech. The Legislature accelerated the proposal, making it 2 percent over two years.
“I think (the walkout) showed that a lot of the education community had lost faith in the state leader,” Bennett said.
Ducey disputed that, saying that he had boosted education funding in the state since before the RedForEd movement threatened a walkout.
He said engineering and shepherding the pay raise package through the Legislature was testament to his leadership skills.