Joe Arpaio isn’t losing, he’s winning ... and bigly

The press has been covering former Sheriff Joe Arpaio for nearly 30 years and still gets him wrong.

Here’s the thing:

Arpaio was Trump before Trump was Trump.

The media judges the former sheriff by way of actual, provable facts. His personal sense of reality, however, is completely different. Or, as Trump’s current lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, most recently said, “Truth isn’t truth.”

Arpaio will not become the next U.S. senator from Arizona. He never was going to become the next senator. He may never even have wanted to be the next senator; that’s difficult to determine. What Arpaio did want, and has always wanted, and has always received, is attention.

Same as Trump.

In these waning days of the Republican primary campaign for the Senate

The Arizona Republic’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez produced a clear-eyed assessment of Arpaio’s topsy-turvy and, ultimately, losing campaign, and how it is “in chaos.”

That is the reality as most of us see it. But not Arpaio.

Chaos, to him, is victory. Chaos draws attention. Attention, to Arpaio, is victory. As he told Wingett Sanchez, “I would imagine that my success recently is conducive to new people I’ve brought in, not being hijacked. My campaign has taken off ... I don’t care about polls.”

He does, actually. But not in the way other politicians care about the polls. It isn’t about getting elected for Arpaio. It’s about being “loved.” During the two-plus decades he was in office, Arpaio told me again and again about how much he believed that “the people” loved him and how much he stayed in politics for them.

His reality.

After having been kicked out of the sheriff’s office, and then being pardoned of his criminal contempt charge by President Donald Trump, Arpaio saw a way to remain in the public spotlight, if only for what will amount to a brief time.

So he ran for the Senate. Every day he remains in that race and every small bit of media attention he receives is, to him, a victory.

Those of us in the media (yes, me included) don’t often remind ourselves how much Arpaio’s selfish need to be on TV or in the papers, and our desire to cover him, has cost others. Both in dollars and in lives.

Arpaio’s narcissism (a trait shared with his friend Trump) not only damaged the lives of immigrant families and others, but led him on egotistical wild goose chases like investigating the validity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate.

Stunts like that were never about seeking justice but simply seeking attention.

We gave it to him.

We still do.