Richard Carmona and Arizona After S.B. 1070
When Richard Carmona talks to voters in Arizona, he likes to tell them that their state—his state—has a lousy reputation. He travels a lot, and people often ask him where he lives. “I say, ‘Arizona,’ ” he says. “And they go, ‘Ooohh.’ ” (This usually draws a murmur of recognition from the crowd.) “And then they start asking me questions about border fences, and electrical fences, and deporting people.”
Luckily, Carmona says, voters have a chance to help their state change its reputation: they can send him to Washington in November, to replace Senator Jon Kyl, who is retiring. Carmona would be the first Democratic senator from Arizona since 1995, and the first Latino senator in the state’s hundred-year history. When he says he wants to fight back against “painfully malicious” policies, he doesn’t have to explain what he’s talking about. In 2010, Arizona enacted Senate Bill 1070, a wide-ranging law that sought to tighten the border and drive out unauthorized immigrants. The bill was immediately contested in court, and many of its provisions were enjoined. Even so, it put the state at the forefront of a national argument over borders and naturalization, and, two years later, it is still being debated; the Supreme Court is currently considering the Justice Department’s claim that S.B. 1070 is unconstitutional, because it interferes with federal immigration policy. In Arizona, the law has energized politicians on both sides, including Carmona, who calls it “divisive” and a craven act of “political symbolism.” If he is elected, the reaction to 1070 will be part of the reason, and his victory could signal a new direction for a state where Latinos have come to think of themselves as an embattled minority.
Like many political candidates, Carmona loves to assure audiences that he is not a politician, and he has plenty of alternative professional identities to choose from. He is a decorated military veteran, a trained surgeon, a medical professor, and a sheriff’s deputy. In 2002, President George W. Bush nominated Carmona to be Surgeon General, and he served for four years, during which he was sometimes asked to consider running for office—as a Republican. Until a few months ago, Carmona was a registered independent, and although his Senate campaign requires close coördination with the Democratic Party, he thinks of himself as nonpartisan: a sensible antidote to the “crazies” who, in his view, have taken over the state.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/05/28/120528fa_fact_sanneh