(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Who is Kyrsten Sinema? [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags'] Date: 2023-02-24 Kyrsten Sinema’s political career is something of a raging hurricane, a careening cyclone that developed rapidly, and is now unraveling into chaos right before our eyes. The issue with Sinema is that it has become very difficult to even understand her and her political trajectory. Manchin makes sense, and in a sense, Manchin’s not changed much since he was a state senator in West Virginia back in the early 1990s. Other national politicians, say Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden, they’ve also changed only insomuch as they’ve had long careers and their political positions have generally stayed around that of the median Democratic party member—which means they’ve both drifted leftwards, Biden more so, since the 1990s. Sinema? Sinema’s a BYU graduate who left the Mormon church to become an atheist/agnostic after graduating. She then worked as a social worker, endorsed Ralph Nader in 2000, and was a Green party activist for years before joining the Democratic party. The problem is Sinema was, by the age of almost 30, a young professional with a Master’s Degree and working on a J.D. in law, a very active and very vocal political activist in Arizona. She transitioned from writing anti-capitalist opinion pieces for Arizona news outlets, to still calling herself a “Prada Socialist” even after election to the Arizona State House. As an activist, she railed against NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, and the World Bank. She attacked capitalism, and in one of my favorites, called her new supporter/defender Joe Lieberman “A shame to the Democratic party” in response to his 2004 Presidential run. She was acerbically and viscerally anti-war, and sounded like the typical hard-left commenter on DailyKos. This was Sinema for a half decade of political activism when she was already an educated working professional. Once in the State House, Sinema made a name for herself as a fiery progressive, quickly allying herself with progressive elements of the party as she rose rapidly in prominence in the state party. She came out as a bisexual in a speech on the legislative floor, and boasted about being the most liberal member of the body in her 2006 reelection campaign. So, up until her election to the State Senate in 2010, you had someone whose entire political persona and adult life (going back to 1999) had been fairly dedicated, sometimes maybe too fervently, to progressive activism, a non-professed atheist bisexual former social worker. It makes sense, doesn’t it? She sounds like the kind of person you would expect someone like her to sound like; hell, most of us probably know someone like that Sinema. Even before becoming a state senator in 2011, however, subtle signs of changes began to occur in Sinema as she rose to a leadership position in the state house. I remember most of us watching her career on what was then the SwingStateProject blog that later folded into DailyKos’s Elections center, wrote these early changes off. Sinema had graduated from Junior Varsity! She had an eye on the state senate, and then a potential new swing district set to be formed in the Tempe, Arizona area and overlapping with part of her Senate district. But the fact remained that Sinema took a hard line against tax increases, and spent months trying to work out bipartisan deals with hardline conservatives on austerity cuts, frequently undercutting the messaging of Arizona Democrats and making it difficult to create a united front against the package or muster public opposition to it. Soon after her election to the state senator, Sinema was on one of the national top 40 under 40 women in politics lists! Most of us following politics across the United States very closely, shot down criticism of Sinema’s behavior in the State Senate with the response that she was simply trying to establish a reputation as a pragmatist and that for her political career to grow, of course she would have to moderate her image in what was then still a solidly red-leaning state. However, it was Sinema’s ridiculously close working relationship with State Senator Russell Pearce that should have raised more flags than it did. For those to whom the name doesn’t ring a bell, Pearce was the Senate Majority Leader who sponsored and passed SB1070 (which included input from FAIR, a eugenicist group tied to various other white nationalist organizations), the draconian immigration bill that the Supreme Court eventually struck down as unconstitutional. Pearce, who coincidentally enough, died just a few weeks ago in early January, was a mix of Joe Arpaio meets Kris Kobach. He managed to be so non-stop controversial and combative, that Republican voters in his overwhelmingly Republican district, ended up voting him out in a 2011 recall election that was the first recall to succeed in Arizona in modern history. Sinema collaborated on a book about bipartisanship with this same Russell Pearce. In fact, soon after joining the State Senate she began consorting and schmoozing with Pearce and Republican leaders, stopped returning calls to old Progressive allies and often began undercutting Dem leaders to get her own priorities passed. She soon stopped associating entirely with many of the progressive activist groups (especially pro-immigrant groups) that she’d been involved with since her start in politics and which had enthusiastically promoted her political career at each point. It goes further than that though. Sinema, alone in the State Senate Dem caucus, opposed Pearce’s recall. She even said she “loved him” and suggested that he run for Congress, then defended herself from criticism about this by calling him her boss. This was right on the verge of Republican voters tossing him out! It’s difficult to even list all of Pearce’s controversies. He called Obama’s opposition to SB1070 a jihad against Arizona. He tried to pass blatantly unconstitutional legislation denying citizenship to the children of undocumented immigrants, and called undocumented immigrants “invaders”. He also shared an anti-Semitic article from a White Nationalist group (the article even included Holocaust denial, which lead to Pearce actually issue an apology and suggesting he’d only read the start of the article and liked its premise about media bias, which is apparently what he calls the suggestion that media is all controlled by rich Jews and multiculturalism is a Jewish conspiracy against White people). Pearce was involved with an actual Neo-Nazi, T.J. Ready, for years, endorsing him for Mesa City Council in 2006, and ordaining him into the LDS priesthood 2 years before that. Ready, a court-martialed ex-marine, would later go on to murder his ex-girlfriend and other family members before committing suicide in 2012 (admittedly this incident occurred after Pearce’s recall and after Pearce had already cut ties with him). Pearce was finally forced to resign from any official position within the Arizona Republican party after he appeared on a local radio show and called for forced sterilization of low-income women on Medicaid in 2014. He slithered into relative obscurity afterwards. This is just the kind of guy he was, a lightning rod who to my knowledge, Sinema never said anything bad about, and to the contrary refused to publicly criticize or oppose and mostly praised. We have now reached the point where Sinema, who for a decade denounced money in politics and in 2012 even campaigned on populist notes about her independence and rejecting big money, was one of the top 10 Dem legislators in congress in terms of financial sector donations, over 2.7 million dollars during the 2017-2018 cycle when she was running for Senate. Sinema has managed to get a rare Chamber of Commerce endorsement and has a higher lifetime rating from the group than all but 9 other Dems in Congress. Despite her long record of environmental activism, she now has the second lowest League of Conservation Voters record of any Dem in Congress, ahead of only, unsurprisingly, Joe Manchin, who represents a 70% Trump-voting coal state. What is truly bizarre about Sinema’s record is the sheer inconsistency of it. She went from voting against Trump’s tax cut bill in 2017 to making repealing the corporate tax cuts in that bill (which she railed against in her 2018 campaign), a red line for her in negotiations over the Build Back Better bill, a position that put her to the right of Joe West Virginia Manchin. She is probably the only figure of any prominence in the entire Democratic party who opposes raising the Capital Gains Tax, and has one of the most bank and hedge fund friendly records in Congress. And unlike Manchin, who loves talking to the press and loves doing political wrangling with Biden and Congressional leadership, Sinema is extremely press-adverse and surprisingly uninvolved in negotiations and worse, often deeply opaque as to what her demands are. Not even the Biden administration (folks like outgoing Chief of Staff Ron Klein) or Chuck Schumer’s team were apparently really sure what exactly Sinema wanted at times in the IRA reductions. Much less to the press and her constituents, even in closed-door, private policy discussions Sinema has apparently been evasive about her goals and policy concerns. Party leaders are often apparently unsure of exactly where she stands on legislation until the last minute, and typically not until Manchin has largely crafted most of the legislation to his whims. At this point, other than single-mindedly blocking any filibuster carve outs, Sinema has mainly made a name for herself as even more militantly anti-regulation and anti-tax than Manchin, who again has always been very conservative and represents a heavily Republican, Trump-y state. Manchin is, simply put, however big an asshole he is, he is what you’d expect him to be and pretty consistent politically with what he’s been for the past 20 years; guy ran for Senate in 2010 by running TV ads of him literally shooting printouts of major Democratic legislation; he was never a punk atheist bisexual Green party anti-war activist. Blatant Pandering and Incompetence The more about Sinema that comes out, the more insufferable she’s become for the last 4 years. Whether it’s the all expenses paid “wine-making internship” she was paid 2000 dollars for and apparently did in the middle of the 2020 pandemic (at an ultra-exclusive California winery owned by a billionaire hedge-fund manager) or her spunky bisexual hipster vibes as she consciously mimicked John McCain’s ACA repeal vote to playfully vote down a national minimum wage increase (she’s transitioned into perhaps the most right-wing member of the Democratic caucus on the minimum wage as well, and well to the right of many figures in MAGA world), Sinema finds a way to be unnecessarily showy and abrasive to progressive interests. She relishes insulting the priorities of progressives, ignoring national party leaders and interest groups, and catering to rich neoliberal business interests. She often demands consensus for its own sake, rather than according to any moral, ethical, or intellectual basis. And to be clear, I’m very intensely in the pragmatic wing of progressives, and am not reflexively radical or anti-capitalist; I’m probably most aptly described as an Elizabeth Warren progressive only more willing to compromise and pursue incrementalist reform, not an Our Revolution activist or democratic socialist. I’m able to forgive and accept a lot and Sinema has driven even me away—and this was prior to her overly dramatic party switch. The thing about Sinema is just how blatant all her posturing is. It is very rare to see someone, who, say, lobbied for the ACA under Obama and was heavily involved in some of the committees giving input for it (to the point she was invited and present for its signing) then repeatedly voted to gut it and undermine key provisions. She openly seeks and prioritizes input from bank executives, hedge fund managers, and conservative business lobbies, and then follows their wishes to a T, whether it is the medical device’s tax repeal or the Retail Investor Protection Act. She’s signaled openness to “reforming” Social Security and Medicare (somehow, I think she’d be fine with Ryan’s voucher program for Medicare and raising the starting age for Social Security to age 70). Then there was the reveal of the behind the scenes “handling instructions” new staffers received from Sinema, mostly using documents predating her successful Senate campaign, but with some sources dating to 2 years ago. Some demands seem odd to laypeople, like the requirement that staffers ALWAYS have a bottle of *room temperature* water ready for Sinema at all times, even when picking her up at the airport, and it is emphasized that the water has to be room temperature. As an ex-Senate page, that demand is less crazy in light of what I experienced in the senate. The cloakrooms have lists of Senators, and pages, when getting Senators a drink, have to reference it, and the list details whether the Senator wants their glass filled with regular bottled water, soda water, or Perrier sparkling water, and whether it is to be room temperature, chilled, or to have ice or not, so I wasn’t surprised by her asinine refreshment requirements. But other parts of the documents seem to be blatant violations of ethics rules, requiring staff to help Sinema with grocery shopping and scheduling private appointments as well as helping her organize her fitness regime (she is a fairly skilled marathon runner and triathlon competitor) around her work schedule (this includes scheduling her weekly hour-long massage sessions, which are obviously not Senate work). Again though, the bizarre element of this political maelstrom is how incompetent Sinema comes off in hindsight. Now, Kyrsten Sinema is an extremely competitive, driven, and intelligent woman. She’s a successful marathoner, (my marathon PR is 16 minutes faster than hers) has three Masters degrees and a J.D. (okay she’s got me there) and she graduated college at 18. She parlayed her activism into a political career where it is now apparent that her own political self-advancement was the biggest overriding concern. Still, she rose to State House leadership within 5 years, then moved onto a brief tenure in the State Senate, followed by a grueling campaign for a swingish house district that she won by 4 points in 2012. She then won a tight reelection campaign in the tough 2014 environment, then by a wider margin in 2016, before in 2018 becoming the first Democrat to win a U.S. Senate seat in Arizona since incumbent Dem Dennis DeConcini did in 1988. For a while, most of her moves, such as joining the Blue Dog Dems and other Third Way groups and moderate organizations, while also veering right on a lot of big-ticket economic issues, seemed to make sense. They did make sense in fact, given that she won the Dem primary in 2018 rather easily, and she held her swing seat rather easily during her 3 terms before winning a tough Senate election. Sinema seemed to be triangulating to win a light red state, on the back of moderate Republicans and swingish independents and as long as that appeared to be the end goal, most of her moves to embrace the political center made sense. Simply put, the pattern of Sinema’s decade of triangulation prior to getting elected to the Senate was that she tended to vote for things backed by Republicans or conservative interest groups that were already passing, sometimes taking free votes on business lobby bills that were dead on arrival anyway, either due to Senate opposition or Obama’s veto pen. For a long time, Sinema played the Clintonian game; she was loudly progressive on abortion and gay rights issues and dialed up her playful, funky, oddball image. She seemed to be playing the long-game: trying to strike a balance to win over fiscally conservative voters where she could, but sticking with the party on the critical votes where her support was potentially make or break. Between 2008, starting in the Arizona State House, all the way through her election to the U.S. Senate and beyond to 2021, she was in the minority party her entire legislative tenure, typically in bodies with hardline Tea Party majorities. So, it made sense that Sinema made some blatant triangulations here and there and I didn’t hold it against her as many other progressive activists did even before she made it to the Senate. I understood her impulse to try and be a showy legislative workhorse and gain a few favors and access to fundraising through some votes on, again, stuff that was already passing or which would never become law. At least up to that point I did get it, because even Trump won Arizona in 2016 and while the blue trend was blatantly apparent, it was a tough state and I wanted a Dem Senator from Arizona, not a MAGA hardliner or an otherwise hardline Republican vote. This was the view of most people posting on DailyKos Elections. We also all thought that after being elected to the Senate, with a 6-year term and her next reelection lined up for a Presidential election that would probably offer her favorable turnout and fair odds that a mainstream Dem candidate was also winning the state for President, that Sinema would strike a somewhat less conservative posture in the Senate, or that at the least she wouldn’t set out to derail major party priorities in a high profile manner. Boy were we all wrong. But this is where Sinema’s haughtiness caused someone who is very good at reading power structures, building alliances and getting favors and donations–in other words, is very good at the traditional legislative skills–to make what I can only describe as an obstinate and bone-headed series of mistakes. Since arriving in the Senate, Sinema has made a point of showing her contempt for Democratic party leadership and shoving her thumb in the eyes of progressive activists and interest groups nearly every time the opportunity shows up and the issue at hand is not related to abortion or gay marriage. The closest I can explain it is that it’s like she never realized she needed to recalibrate once in the Senate and especially to recalibrate once her party took the majority and held the presidency and she was no longer a junior Minority party member. I have to give Senator Sinema credit. She’s struck an incredible and delicate balance: she’s managed to piss everyone off. Sinema’s developed a reputation as not being a party player, burning bridges with national Democratic leaders and in Arizona. This behavior goes as far back as 2016 when she declined to campaign for Hillary Clinton or aid Clinton’s campaign in the state, and she had burgeoning reputation as self-centered, even by the standards of politicians. Arizona Democratic party leaders were kept at just as much an arm’s length as national leaders where, to the point where, in 2022, with a Trump-endorsed election-denying slate of truly far-right MAGA Republicans running statewide in Arizona, the most Sinema did was issue a press release endorsing Democrats. Even her own Senate colleague, Mark Kelly—who has had no trouble winning 2 competitive elections in Arizona, (both by larger margins than Sinema did in 2018), despite being a much more mainstream Democrat than her—requested but couldn’t get Sinema on board for joint campaign appearances, fundraisers, ads together, or any of the sort of stuff colleagues in tough elections usually do. This was even after Kelly risked the ire of AZ progressives by opposing the censure of Sinema in early 2022. Establishment party leaders, union figures, environmental organizations, name a Dem constituency and she’s pissed them off. She’s pissed off progressive voters. And she’s also pissed off mainstream Democrats, even many moderates, starting with her votes undermining Obamacare and financial industry regulations,her vote against the minimum wage increase and her way-out-of-synch position against higher capital gains tax rates and raising the corporate tax rate back to pre-Trump levels. Even before she became an *independent* polls were showing Sinema with an approval rating among her own party’s voters that was in the single digits, and she was down against Reuben Gallego by a huge margin in several potential primary polls. The baffling part of it all is the why of this political shift. I want to split the why into two pieces, in fact. First, why did she seem to think she could suddenly vote however she wanted, ignore the Democratic establishment (she’s apparently considered them all idiots who are beneath her intellect since what she perceived as incompetence from the DCCC during her 2012 Congressional campaign), ignore every major interest group that wasn’t tied to big business, and just otherwise not seem at all concerned with a potential primary. It wasn’t like she was Joe Lieberman (and she made a vocal point of being far more right-wing than even Lieberman was on economic and environmental issues compared to the rest of the party) with decades under her belt as a statewide official, her own political machine, deep connections to the national establishment, and a turn as a VP nominee. The second why is: why did she do it? It was pretty clear going back to early on in her Senate tenure, in 2019, that this posturing was killing her ratings among Dem voters and that her behavior and attitude were needlessly antagonizing virtually everyone in the AZ Democratic party. I can’t even imagine that Kyrsten Sinema was too stupid to not notice this or acknowledge the polling and increasing isolation. What’s more, Mark Kelly beat the same Republican Sinema did, and he did it while Biden was narrowly winning the state, both of whom won with mainstream Democratic policy platforms that included being way to her left on a number of critical economic issues. There was proof that it was no longer necessary to pander to the Right in Arizona quite as aggressively as Sinema had up to that point to get ahead, and yet no recalculation came. With her first session in a majority party, a Dem House, and Biden in the Presidency, the time was ripe for Sinema to transition into a low-key, somewhat mainstream vote and work to repair her relationship with progressive interest groups by handing them an olive branch. Instead, Mark Kelly voted mostly like a typical Democrat and then won again by 5 in a midterm dynamic that usually favors the out party by a lot. Her recalculation to that victory, along with a substantial Dem overperformance in the midterms that left her with no way to play kingmaker, was to switch parties to independent. The thing is, Democrats picked up a seat so Sinema can’t flip control to Republicans (not unless she and Manchin both agree to do so), and she immediately said she would keep working with the majority caucus, while somehow implying she wouldn’t caucus with them, which is simply not how Senate precedent for independents works. Again, she switched parties to gain nothing. She can’t get any special deals from the minority Republicans, and she’s just further antagonizing the incumbent Dem President and her Democratic colleagues. What’s more, 3-way polls of her running as an independent for reelection have her polling in the low teens. Because again, she’s pissed everyone off and Arizona Republicans hate her guts anyway because she’s opposed Trump and she is not, for whatever her flaws, a hardline Republican in rhetoric or persona (funky bisexual ex-Mormon atheist hipster is, shockingly, not a politically helpful persona for Arizona Republicans who are mostly evangelical Christians or Mormons). Dems aren’t going to give her a pass and basically support her candidacy like they do with Angus King (I-ME), and King himself is a very popular political giant in his state with decades of success in state politics. Republicans aren’t going to roll over for her like they did for Lieberman either. So, all she’s left with for reelection is a tiny rump of voters mostly like her: fickle, anti-establishment, pro-business, educated White suburbanites who aren’t deeply embedded in religious organizations. The obvious answer is that Sinema’s already set her sights on the Presidency. The moment I read about the switch, my first thought was, “Oh God, she’s going to make up some new party of commandeer Yang’s third party clusterfuck and run a weird, politically incoherent campaign for President with Howard Schulz or some other Richie rich union-busting asshole who hates taxes and regulations but also hates evangelicalism and Trump.” I have no doubt Sinema is too smart to think she has any chance winning the Presidency in a highly polarized era, especially with a sterile, corporate neoliberal platform and a seemingly likely clash between Trump and Biden (or Harris), who will almost certainly unite 90% of the country behind one or the other. I think she’s well aware that no established third party that has the organizational infrastructure in place for Presidential campaigns will want her, and that ballot access is titanically difficult and expensive for new third parties, regardless of how prominent their standard-bearers are and even if they have a lot of money. Logistically, as well, it is very difficult to get the talented political organizers and data teams in place necessary to even get ballot placement, much less organize campaign apparatuses across all 50 states in 12~18 months, even with hundreds of millions of dollars in seed funding from say, socially left-wing billionaires like Shultz and Bloomberg. So why do I feel like she’s aiming for President? Because it’s the only thing that makes sense. Sinema is too smart to be stupid enough to think switching to independent would help her win reelection and the overriding feature of everything she’s done professionally since 2008 has been done with the aim of increasing her profile and winning higher office. So why would she throw that away now if not for a vanity Presidential campaign? Again: Sinema could have always done a few cheap pivots in the first half of Biden’s term to stop a primary bid from happening; the calculus wasn’t hard: suddenly endorse a filibuster carve out (meaningless without Manchin, and now meaningless with a Republican House), sign on to some key Biden plans, make happy with Schumer, pander to Dem groups such as unions like she pandered to the Chamber of Commerce, and make an electability argument while getting establishment organizations to circle the wagons around her. If she’d gotten an early start, Gallego probably wouldn’t have even begun laying groundwork for a campaign against her and she’d probably have never gotten censured by the AZ Democratic party either. This method gave her much better odds than switching her party to independent and gave her much more influence by actually playing to the current power centers in D.C. Then why run for President? Come on, I’m sure it’s a dream come true. Just running for President is a great honor, and she’s never liked the Democratic party to start with (or the Republican Party), and she’s always been convinced she’s the smartest and most talented, well-keeled person in the room. It must have been clear to Sinema for a while that her quirky political style mixing a friendly and approachable hipster persona with social liberalism and right-wing anti-tax, anti-regulation economic policies was not the direction the Democratic party was racing in, but not something she was apparently willing to compromise either. Running for President means she can rake in donations from corporations and rich people, and that she’ll spend 2024 traveling, getting VIP treatment, staying in VIP hotel suites and eating at high-end gourmet eateries for exclusive fundraisers and strategy meetings and it’s mostly covered by the campaign. She can ditch all the tedium of being a legislative backbencher (with less influence than ever), in favor of a whirlwind political campaign for President—no matter if she ends up with 6% of the vote at best and potentially swings the election to Trump at worst. Then once she’s done, Sinema, who always ranks towards the absolute bottom of Congress in terms of personal wealth, (she’s been in elected office since 2005 and before that she was just a social worker, so there’s no point when she had a job paying enough to amass much wealth) well she cashes out of course! She’s been grinding her way up this monotonous political system, coming from lower income means herself and being largely self-made, but forced to continually look at grotesque wealth and privilege from the outside for years. After her run for President she can do anything, and anything she does, as a prominent ex-Senator and third party Presidential candidate, is going to come with at least quadruple the paycheck of a Senator. A third way think tank? She can get paid 800k a year just to do some light fundraising, have lunches with politicians and academics, make a few basic personnel decisions, and otherwise just have to sign off on media, final policy papers and so on. Way easier than being a senator! Or Sinema can join some billionaire’s hedge fund, or some lobbying group and easily be making 1.5~2 million a year as a lobbyist or industry spokesperson. These are both easy-peasy jobs cashing in on social capital and fame, with low-stress responsibilities, huge paychecks, and a mountain of perks including nonstop travel with high end hotels and gourmet meals comped as part of your working expenses. After a decade of grinding, doing up to 20 hours a week in monotonous fundraising phone calls on top of nonstop travel across the country to D.C., on top of committee meetings and floor votes, caucus meetings, private negotiations and legislative discussions, constituent services, and more at all hours (although Sinema is apparently pretty hardcore among senators in that she has a strict order not to contact her after 8PM). This irregular, stressful, never-ending schedule is on top of the intense scrutiny of media and random strangers, plus the never-ending life of competitive elections faced by swing state politicians. I don’t struggle to understand why Sinema’s goal is to amass the most favors and social capital possible with the centers of economic and financial power in return for this kind of job. I finally think I have a grasp of who Kyrsten Sinema is. She’s an ultra-competitive, highly driven woman who is very smart and quickly grasps where power is and what serves her personal interests (in a political career or otherwise) best and cares only about that interest, not the interest of the Democratic party, or poor Arizonans or say, southern Black voters targeted by racial redistricting and voter ID programs. She has a few redlines on cultural issues and is not comfortable with Christian nationalism nor interested in compromising on social liberties, but otherwise she views her success as hard-earned and as the symbol of her innate talent and skills, and thinks society is otherwise meritocratic and is comfortable with a fairly hardline anti-regulation, pro-business ideology. This is the ultimate trajectory of her career; that as her station in life has risen, her interest in anti-capitalist ideology or her sympathy and interest in those in lower economic and social classes than her, has dropped in a clear inverse relationship. If anything, given how she abruptly resigned from the Arizona State Senate after less than a year and half in the body to focus on running for U.S. House, I wouldn’t be surprised if Sinema resigned in the case she launches a third party Presidential run. Katie Hobbs would probably just end up appointing Gallego to the seat giving him a bit of incumbency before the general election. This whole story is unfortunate though that it even came to this. At this point, I wish that former Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick had not left the AZ-01 district to wage a quixotic campaign against the aging John McCain in 2016, and instead run for reelection, (she would have won comfortably), then jumped into the 2018 Senate race right away. That would have given Democrats an arguably more electable, battle-tested and well-liked by party leaders alternative to Sinema and we could have avoided the years of headaches and grandstanding Sinema has caused since arriving in the Senate. This includes revoking the corporate tax cuts that Trump pushed through as well as increases to the capital gains tax, because remarkably, Manchin was very much on board with both those things, which only failed because Sinema resolutely rejected them. We are nearing the end of this saga, and it can’t come soon enough. I feel comfortable saying this Senator Sinema: Goodbye and good riddance. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/24/2154856/-Who-is-Kyrsten-Sinema Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/