In Arizona, We're Not Afraid to Stand Alone

TUCSON

"You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make him drink," my mother used to say. "But give me that horse, and I'll figure out a way to make him thirsty."

Arizona's political landscape is full of can-do folks like that, people like my parents, who migrated to Arizona in the old days -- 1948 to be precise, when air conditioning wasn't yet widely available to help tame the long hot summers. Originally they came to the desert for the dry air and for my father's health. Ultimately they stayed, creating new lives for themselves and their children, because they loved it.

I've never met John McCain, but my parents did, and they were enthusiastic supporters when he ran for office. Like them, McCain isn't a native Arizonan. Some people complained that he moved here for the sole and calculated purpose of starting his political career in a place where his second wife's family connections could help make that happen. But how is that different from generations of miners who were also "opportunists" when they came to this patch of desert looking for better jobs or better lives -- the same way my father did? In that regard, McCain is no different from the state's fabled copper barons, such as Jack Greenway, who came to Arizona from Minnesota in 1910 and made his fortune here.

Most people in Arizona aren't all that concerned about what motivated McCain's move here. What does matter is that once he arrived in the 48th state, he stayed, doing most snow birds one better by short-circuiting the long summer/winter commute by having homes--who knows how many?--in places like Phoenix and near Sedona 90 miles away. (That's a long time Arizona tradition by the way. The Tohono O'odham, the Desert People, have had alternating desert and mountain homes for thousands of years.) In this regard John McCain's history fits in with those of many of his Arizona neighbors. He's one of them, a man of the West -- someone accustomed to the jagged mountains and blue skies and open spaces, and with the scars of excised skin cancer that prove he has spent too much time in the blazing desert sun.

McCain also seems to come with a quirkiness that may appear odd to more sophisticated metropolitan folks. But Arizonans understand quirky. Quirky describes Ed Schefflin, the single-minded 19th-century prospector who braved the Apache-dominated Sonoran Desert with nothing more than a chaw of tobacco and a mule to discover silver in what would become the town of Tombstone. Quirky is cowgirl-turned-bookseller Winn Bundy, who runs Singing Wind, a world-famous bookstore on her ranch in the middle of nowhere outside the tiny burg of Benson. Arizonans have a grudging respect for outlaws, too, like the Apache leader Geronimo or the Clanton gang, who did a whole lot more in southern Arizona than just have that shootout at the O.K. Corral.

That's one of the reasons McCain resonates with Arizonans. They like the fact that he hung tough through all his years as a POW, and that he refused to give up last summer when all the political pundits were busy declaring that his candidacy was over. I understand how that works. As a college junior in 1964, I wasn't admitted into the University of Arizona's creative writing program just because, as the professor told me, I was "a girl." What did my mother have to say about that? "Stand alone. Eventually, the crowd may fall." And the crowd did fall. John McCain persevered, and so did I. I'm writing this with 39 published novels under my belt, and McCain's the Republican nominee for president.

That kind of stubbornness works in Arizona. It's part of our political tradition. In the 1950s, when the idea of daylight saving time was first broached in peacetime, one of our state representatives stood up in the legislative chambers and announced to all the world: "This is Arizona. We don't need any more G.D. . . . daylight!" When the votes were counted, the nays had it. To this day, Arizona stays true to Mountain Standard Time, while the states around it wax and wane according to the seasons. People in Arizona aren't afraid to go it alone.

Neither, apparently, is McCain. The far-right base went nuts in 2005 when he joined what was referred to as the "Gang of 14." This was a bipartisan group of senators who negotiated a compromise to stave off a Democratic filibuster of President Bush's judicial appointments. That was supposedly a terrible betrayal of McCain's Republican roots, but it was actually a principled reach across a gaping political divide that helped make possible the appointment of a fine Supreme Court justice, Samuel A. Alito Jr.

It's the same with immigration. The neverending tide of illegal immigrants coming across the Mexican border is a huge problem in Arizona, and it's often part of the complications in the stories I write about my fictional Cochise County sheriff, Joanna Brady. In real life and fiction both, the burden of federally mandated and unreimbursed emergency health care has put a terrible strain on local hospitals and has resulted in the closing of several trauma centers.

People in Arizona are mad as hell about that. They believe that if the feds order something, they need to pay for it. And the Constitution says that the federal government will provide for the common defense -- but who's protecting the rights of the landowners whose property is being trampled and whose livestock is being damaged by the uncontrolled entry of illegal migrants crossing the border on foot and in vehicles?

McCain's stand on illegal immigration strikes me and many other Arizonans as good common sense. He wants to secure our borders first, then learn who-all is here, both legally and illegally, and then address their immigration status while at the same time undoing some of the tangled knot of esoteric visa rules that make no sense under current economic realities. That isn't nearly so tough a stand as some on the right would like it to be. On the other hand, it's way too far to the right to be acceptable to the left. Which puts him square in the middle -- a good place, to my way of thinking, for a guy from Arizona. We're part of the middle. We're not East Coast, and we're not West Coast, either.