Politics Daily – Rodney Glassman vs. John McCain: A David and Goliath Senate Fight in Arizona
August 25, 2010
PHOENIX — Rodney Glassman, the Democrat who will face Republican Sen. John McCain this fall, is a big believer in credentials. He’s punched every imaginable ticket and then some.
Bachelor’s degree, master’s in business administration, master’s in public administration, Ph.D. in arid land resource sciences, law degree. Business consultant, retirement planning counselor, JAG lawyer in the Air Force reserve. Legislative aide to a congressman. Tucson vice mayor and city council member. Spanish speaker. Founder and president of the Glassman Foundation, a charity for underprivileged children. And he’s expecting his own first child in November.
Not bad for a 32-year-old.
That’s right, Arizona Democrats on Tuesday night nominated a wealthy Gen-X candidate to go up against the Republican Party’s 2008 presidential nominee, who will be 74 on Sunday. Early polls of a general election contest between the two suggest voters will favor age over youth.
Glassman was not Democrats’ top pick to run this year. Many hoped to woo Nan Walden, a southern Arizona lawyer and businesswoman who once worked on Capitol Hill as an aide to senators Bill Bradley and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The party’s interest in Arizona waned when Walden decided against the race and when it became clear that McCain would dispatch challenger J.D. Hayworth (who would have been an easier target). The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has reserved TV time in big battlegrounds such as Kentucky, Missouri, Pennsylvania and Colorado, but not here.
Still, Glassman has received encouragement, and money, from other sources. He’s been endorsed by the Planned Parenthood Action Fund (“a strong advocate for children and working families”) and many unions, as well as by the Arizona Republic (“a savvy, young newcomer with a bright political future”).
In Washington, there’s much hand-wringing about the evolution of McCain from an iconoclastic moderate to hard-line conservative on matters ranging from climate change and immigration to taxes and gays in the military. Glassman plans a different kind of campaign. He says McCain is a “world senator” who has neglected his state. “We have a senator unfortunately in John McCain who’s really built his career off of giving speeches in other states about what he doesn’t do for Arizona,” Glassman told me on a sweltering day this month, as we sat in a borrowed office in his headquarters.
Glassman rattled off examples of what he means: “The average state receives $45 per person in federal projects. Arizona receives $15. John McCain calls that pork. And so I’ve been traveling the state for over six months, visiting with elected officials and learning about the projects that their communities aren’t receiving.” He mentioned county authorities who are trying to replace a jail built in the 1950s, and said cloudy Portland, Ore., gets more federal money for solar projects than Phoenix. Bringing more jobs to the state “simply begins by filling out the forms and participating in the appropriations process,” Glassman told me. “You have congress people across our state who are working to bring infrastructure projects to Arizona…they don’t have a partner in the U.S. Senate.”
Some lawmakers consider it their duty to identify needs in their states and districts, and help them get money. Better they make those decisions, they say, than “bureaucrats” at some agency or congressional committee. But McCain has been public enemy No. 1 of pork-barrel spending on local projects for years, and often talks about how he will name names and embarrass people who go after the money. He’s doing just that with stimulus projects. In 2008, largely due to McCain and a handful of other anti-pork Arizona lawmakers, the state ranked dead last in its share of such federal dollars, according to an analysis by Taxpayers for Common Sense.
So Glassman has a point. Still, it’s not an ideal time for anyone to accuse McCain of neglecting his state. A few months ago he and Sen. Jon Kyl proposed a 10-point plan to secure the Arizona border with Mexico and they are seeking $4 billion from the federal government to make it happen.
Other factors working against Glassman this fall include a terrible economy for which his party and president are being held responsible; possible campaign money problems (he was supposed to be a self-funder, but some reports have questioned whether his family will come through with the bucks), and his own youth and inexperience.
The hits are coming from the right and the left. Blogger Andrew Montalbano at the Tucson Conservative Examiner said Glassman made a mess of Tucson finances. The anti-Glassman Three Sonorans blog called him a puppet of his rich father. In a less colorful but possibly more problematic vein, he lost three key aides — his field, political and communications directors — just a few weeks before the primary. The liberal Blog for Arizona described his campaign as a “slow-motion implosion.”
Another potential challenge in today’s increasingly conservative environment is that Glassman’s positions on immigration and climate are similar to the ones McCain has jettisoned. Arizona’s tough new immigration law is popular, but Glassman calls it an unfunded mandate and “a rash attempt to score political points.” He supports beefed up border enforcement, a guest worker program and “a realistic solution” for integrating undocumented immigrants into U.S. society.
On his website, Glassman backs “a strong regulatory framework for carbon-based emissions.” That sounds like a cap-and-trade system, but the phrase doesn’t appear. “Cap-and-trade’s become a partisan term,” he told me. “I would be excited about championing legislation that people understood, that reduced our carbon footprint, that increased our use of renewables, that included a significant federal investment in green industries. And that’s what good cap-and-trade legislation’s going to look like. But to throw out the term before the substance is dangerous.”
Glassman displayed even greater semantic caution this month when gay and lesbian Democrats, gathered at a restaurant here to meet him, asked if he supported same-sex marriage. “What I support is the eight-letter word equality,” he said. He suggested in a roundabout way that marriage should be handled in the realm of religion and equal rights in the realm of law, but “if we’re going to legislate around the word marriage,” then “there should be no difference” between the rights of heterosexuals and homosexuals. “Separate but equal is not acceptable,” he said.
Bottom line: There were no sound bites from that event, or from my interview, in which he said he supported gay marriage or cap-and-trade.
After age, the greatest gulf between Glassman and McCain is national security. McCain is an expert. Glassman is a novice and makes no bones about it. “I am going to continue to surround myself with people very knowledgeable about foreign affairs,” he said. “At the end of the day, it’s going to be about being able to connect with the resources” you need. In any case, he added, the main focus of his campaign will be “Arizona issues.”
It is not hard to imagine Glassman coming off in a debate with McCain as completely out of his depth or, alternatively, as some kind of wunderkind. He reminds of me of my son, a violinist, when he was 10 or 12 and hadn’t yet been afflicted with stage fright. Glassman is insulated not just by his youth, but also by his family money and many career options. If he fails badly this fall, he won’t have to worry about where his next job or dollar is coming from. If he performs creditably, he’s got a head start for his next try at public office. If he beats McCain, it will be the upset of the decade.
