Word: arizonas
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...Arizona Preaching Politics Calling it "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," 33 pastors in 22 states risked their churches' tax-exempt status by delivering sermons on Sept. 28 about presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama. Organized by Arizona's Alliance Defense Fund, the campaign protests a 1954 federal law that forbids pastors from endorsing politicians during worship. A church-state separation group immediately filed complaints with...
...main fault line is a familiar one: illegal immigration. McCain and his allies in Arizona, including most of the state's congressional delegation (though it unanimously voted Monday against the Wall Street bailout plan pushed by McCain) and many of the state's leading business interests, favor a dual approach combining enforcement and a path to citizenship. The rambunctious populist wing of the state GOP, led in part by state representative Russell Pearce from Mesa, favors a much tougher stance of deportations first and foremost...
...There's a civil war going on in the Republican Party here," says David Berman, a professor emeritus with Arizona State University and a longtime observer of Arizona politics. "The division has severed off the business people from the social conservatives." Berman says that McCain's allies fought Pearce fiercely in the GOP primary for an open state senate seat, going so far as hiring hard-hitting political consultant Nathan Sproul to hammer away at Pearce. "They hired one of the sleaziest operators around," says Berman, "who used to only do this thing to Democrats...
...After the censure, he made it a big issue to shut down whoever disagrees with him," says Haney. Specifically, the McCain camp recruited former Arizona governor J. Fife Symington III to run for Haney's party position the next year. Haney was incredulous. "They recruited a former governor?" he says. "To run as one of 30 chairmen in the state? The risk he took just brings into question his level-headedness, I guess...
...even if such attacks could potentially give McCain a brief boost, it's not at all clear that they would help for the long haul. After all, since midsummer, the Arizona Senator has effectively dominated the day-to-day media narrative through a series of surprising, bold and, to some, reckless tactical moves designed to keep his opponent on the ropes. Through depicting Obama as Paris Hilton, selecting the little-known governor of Alaska as his running mate, manufacturing the lipstick-on-a-pig contretemps and, most recently, "suspending" his campaign to tend to the financial crisis, McCain has consistently...