The Arizona Republic’s front-page profile on me today spent a lot of time reviewing and recording what I wrote and thought more than 20 years ago, when I was in college.
It is interesting how often Janet Napolitano’s campaign talking points — as reflected in the statements of her surrogates or Democratic Party-funded attacks — wind up in supposedly objective features on me.
Unwilling to defend Janet Napolitano’s failure to secure the border, failure to lessen crime, and failure to improve education, transportation or CPS, they would much rather take a few sentences I wrote in college out of context and run against that.
In that task they have a lot of help in the mainstream media. In a low-budget election, it’s nice when you have a 300-thousand-plus circulation newspaper to drive your campaign themes.
Here are the takeaways. I have been an award-winning, successful leader in all that I have done beginning in college. As such, I was out front speaking and writing about difficult policy issues when most college students and law students were bar-hopping. (And after viewing some of the distortions of my writings, I’m thinking bar-hopping might have been a better choice.)
My take on issues was so controversial that a liberal faculty voted me the Outstanding Graduate of the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at ASU.
Do we really want “stealth” candidates for office who have never accomplished or taken a stand on anything?
And just to be fair, are these same objective journalists going back to determine exactly what Janet Napolitano did, said and believed when she was a radical feminist activist and one of the first two students in the women’s studies program at Santa Clara College?
Are they talking to college classmates who she hasn’t talked to in 20 years, like they did for my article? Will they give prominent space and credibility to her harshest critics and political opponents, as they did for my article?
Will they go back and determine her reputation when she first ran for Attorney General, as one liberal newspaper put it in 1998: “The feminist: Janet Napolitano…. She’d make a great candidate in, say, Massachusetts. But she’s got the wrong profile to run in stodgy Arizona.”
Will they review the cynical creation of her “made for politics” image as a tough prosecutor, as she acknowledged 8 years ago in a New Times feature:
Days after Bill Clinton’s election, then-senator Dennis DeConcini called and asked Napolitano if she’d like to be U.S. attorney for the District of Arizona.
“I really didn’t know what a U.S. attorney did,” she admits. She took a few former U.S. attorneys to lunch, and decided she’d like the job.
I guess we’ll have to wait until next week to find out.