I never really thought my marriage would last, not even when I was standing there in a frumpy white dress saying, "I do." But I never thought I would leave the Republican Party. That, for me, was a constant. That was sacred.
But in the past three weeks, the Arizona Republican Party did what four years on a left-leaning college campus could not: It made me an Independent. There's a lesson here for David Horowitz — the biggest danger to young conservatives in this state isn't lefty professors. It's the moral bankruptcy of our own party.
Danny Hellman
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There is a cancer on the state Republican Party. And I'm not going to stand by to watch it metastasize.
I'm writing this with a heavy heart. One of my earliest memories is standing in a voting booth with my mom, watching her cast a ballot for Ronald Reagan. I was 3 years old. The day after America elected Bill Clinton, I wore black to my high school — in mourning. And I've seriously got to be the only College Republican who wrote a swooning paean to Bob Dole for her campus newspaper in 1996. Nobody was excited about Dole! But I was a true believer.
And that hasn't changed, not really. I still believe in the same principles: freedom, limited government, the sanctity of human life.
The problem is that now I live in Arizona.
Last month, the party slandered a good man in the most vile and deceitful of ways. The TV commercial accusing Dan Saban of sexual shenanigans was the most disgusting thing I've seen in nine years as a reporter, and that's saying something. This was the sort of ad you'd be embarrassed to watch with your parents in the room. It was also intellectually dishonest.
But that's not the reason I'm leaving, not entirely.
This is a divorce, after all. You don't wake up and say, "I'm out of here." You do the slow dance of disillusionment. You fight. You hate your spouse more for not letting you go.
Then, finally, you file your papers and you walk out.
In the end, what got me was the money.
The GOP broke campaign finance laws to run the anti-Saban ad. The law unquestionably requires the party to disclose the source of all donations. Yet in the case of $105,000 linked to nasty adds against Saban and fellow Democrat Tim Nelson, it did not. Randy Pullen, the party's chairman, told the Capitol Times' Yellow Sheet two weeks ago that he didn't even know who made the donation. A week later, when the Yellow Sheet pushed, he admitted that his contact was a high-ranking member of the Sheriff's Office.
Why does that matter?
There's a reason Sheriff Joe Arpaio has insisted that he had nothing to do with the attack ad. It would be completely illegal if he had! By law, independent expenditures (like the one that paid for the ad) cannot be made in conjunction with a candidate's campaign. Period.
Yet Pullen's contact for the six-figure donation was the commander of the sheriff's own SWAT team. Commander Joel Fox is so close to Arpaio that he filed the sheriff's nominating petitions back in 2004.
The commander got his job running the SWAT team because of his support. After the 2004 election, Arpaio dumped the team's longtime leader for supporting Saban. Fox and another Arpaio loyalist got the job instead — resulting in a debacle when the inexperienced new commanders led their men into an ambush, as reported by the East Valley Tribune here).
Now, four years after he worked for Arpaio's campaign, Commander Fox has apparently become the Republican Party's bag man — for ads so sleazy that the GOP ultimately had to ask TV stations to take them off the air.
Normally I wouldn't take all this quite so personally. I've grown to expect no less from the sheriff's goon squad.
But the people who screwed up here weren't just Arpaio's people. These were top officials at the Arizona Republican Party.
Chairman Randy Pullen accepted a six-figure donation without getting a comprehensive list of donors, as required by law. Based on his public statements since this thing blew up, we can assume he got the cash from Commander Joel Fox. Then, Pullen apparently channeled the money to a newly formed group called Arizonans for Public Safety — just in time for a smear campaign against the man challenging Fox's boss.
What was he thinking?
That no one would notice? This was the scuzziest ad seen on TV since Willie Horton, and Pullen thought no one would bother to follow up on the funding?
The GOP ran the ads, according to Pullen, because it thought voters need to know about Dan Saban's character.
Yet the worst smears in the ad, the ones odiously suggesting that Saban had been investigated for rape and exposing himself to a child, were completely misleading. There was never a credible allegation relating to either charge. They're also old news — my colleague Paul Rubin debunked both in this newspaper ("Boob's Tube," January 25, 2007). Saban's lawsuit against Arpaio in the wake of the 2004 election proved just how baseless the charges were.
