The Democrats' New Western Stars

(5 of 8)

Napolitano does not dress like a cowboy. She is diminutive and feisty. "She's kind of a female Hubert Humphrey, a real happy warrior, only much tougher than Hubert," says Fred DuVal, a prominent Arizona Democratic fund raiser. Napolitano romped in her 2006 re-election campaign over Len Munsil, a religious conservative who campaigned against gay marriage and in favor of a punitive anti-immigration policy, both of which were profoundly out of step with public opinion. Arizona actually voted against a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in 2006--and in the two congressional districts where Democrats supplanted Republicans, the losers were best known for extremist fearmongering on the immigration issue. Indeed, Napolitano set the tone for Rocky Mountain Democrats in 2005, declaring a state of emergency and asking President Bush to move the National Guard down to the border--but also supporting a guest-worker program and eventual citizenship for those already here illegally. "The Republican Party has spent a lot of time eating its own, with the far-right making war on moderates over immigration and values issues," Napolitano told me. She then showed me, in a whirlwind tour of Tucson, how she had won the support of the local business community. She told a Chamber of Commerce group, "The population of this state is going to double by 2030. We've got to figure out how to handle that. You don't want to create 50,000-person subdivisions without a transportation plan. And you need skilled workers to build the houses and engineers to design the infrastructure, so you're gonna hear a lot from me about education. I'm not entirely kidding when I say you shouldn't be able to get a driver's license unless you've passed algebra."

A more surprising alliance than Napolitano's mind-meld with businesspeople has developed between liberals, especially environmental activists, and the conservative hunting-and-fishing community--the "hook and bullet" crowd--over the exploitation of natural resources. "Not every place on God's green earth needs to be open to natural-gas exploration," says George Orbanek, the conservative publisher of Colorado's Grand Junction Daily Sentinel. "You don't need to put up natural-gas rigs in the Grand Junction watershed, for example. The problem is, we've gone from the extreme Democrat tree huggers in the 1990s to a hard-right Republican Party that knows no boundaries. The party with the problem now is the G.O.P. That's why we endorsed John Salazar for Congress. He's not a Nancy Pelosi Democrat. He thinks we've got enough gun laws, he's against the death tax, he's a libertarian on social issues, and he knows that the deer and elk around here just don't like to hang out around natural-gas rigs."