The Republican candidates for office in Arizona are a bunch of doozies, all right - the GOP candidates there for U.S. Senator, state Attorney General, and state Secretary of State are all election deniers who would be prepared at a moment's notice to give the state to Trump in the 2024 presidential election even if the Democratic nominee wins it by a landslide. And no Arizona Republican is more of a doozy than Republican gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.
Kari Lake (above) is a former TV news anchor in Phoenix. That alone does not disqualify her from politics. In fact, several journalists have entered politics. Warren Harding was a newspaper editor who eventually made his way to the Presidency. Alan Cranston was a war correspondent who got into politics because he wanted to do something about the atrocities he was covering; a failed candidate for the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination, he nonetheless served four terms as a U.S. Senator from California. More recently, CBS correspondent Linda Douglass quit the news business to become a White House spokeswoman for President Obama's health care reform bill. But journalism is supposed to be about reporting the truth; Lake is all about lies. She's so out of touch with reality that it's easy to conclude that she spent her time as an evening-news anchor at KSAZ-TV (a Fox affiliate, natch) reading copy but having no role in writing or editing it.
In other words, she's Ted Baxter in a pantsuit.
Lake embraces the lies about the 2020 presidential election, saying that Trump actually won. She supports increased availability for hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin to fight COVID - long after both drugs have been proven ineffective against the disease. She's also been so pro-gun-rights that she has vowed not to enforce federal firearms laws as governor. Oh, yeah, and she made fun of the lack of security at the Pelosis' San Francisco home when Paul Pelosi was attacked.
And yet, she's going to win tomorrow.
How do I know that? Because she has honed her media and communication skills in her television career. She's telegenic, polished, glamorous in a sort of Middle American mom-next-door way, and she's immediately recognizable. Arizona Attorney General Katie Hobbs, her Democratic opponent for the state's governorship, is none of those things, and Hobbs has run such a low-key campaign - including a refusal to debate Lake because she doesn't want to be dragged down in the mud with her - that many people wonder if she really wants the job.
Hobbs (above) is basing her strategy on concentrating on Maricopa County - the state's most populous county, which includes Phoenix - and relying on small campaign events in which she can connect directly with the voters and explain her positions and why they're better than the policies Lake is espousing. Retail politics at their most hyperlocal. Hobbs knows she can't compete with Lake at her own game - big rallies and all that - so she's betting everything on a slow, steady strategy to win the race.
Bu in these times ,where TV image is everything and substance is nothing, it's a risky strategy at best that is likely to fail at worst.
Fans of "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" will recall the episode in which Ted Baxter runs for the Minneapolis city council, but his moronic approach to the issues eventually dooms his campaign. But this isn't a TV show. Kari Lake is not running for just a city council seat, she's running to be governor of Arizona . . . and while she's a moron, stupidity, it turns out is very much in vogue with the American electorate this year.
And in Arizona, that goes double.
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