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"Tear gas sucks"
I was minding my own business when the Seattle cops gassed me.
By Zach Works
[12/02/99]

A no-win situation
Nonviolent protesters get hit from both sides at the WTO conference in Seattle.
By L.A. Kauffman
[12/02/99]

If he can make it here ...
Arizona Sen. John McCain's toughest opponent in the New York primary is not George W. Bush, but the state's Byzantine process for qualifying for the ballot.
By Andrea Bernstein
[12/02/99]

WTO protesters go to the Web
Guerrilla journalists and webcams bring you all the tear-gassed excitement of Seattle's street protests.
By Fiona Morgan
[12/01/99]

Bare breasts, green condoms and rubber bullets
The WTO has united labor and the radical, countercultural left in a way the anti-war movement never could.
By David Moberg
[12/01/99]

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On the stump in conservative Arizona, McCain evokes as many Democrats as he does Republicans, citing Jack Kennedy, Harry Truman and former Democratic Rep. Mo Udall as often as he does Teddy Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan. At a surreal moment in an otherwise ordinary campaign stop at the Mesa Arizona Rotary Club, McCain even quoted Chairman Mao. When asked about his policy on education, McCain ticked off his normal list of states-rights slogans and ended with a twist. "Like Chairman Mao, I believe we should let 1,000 flowers bloom."

Visiting sprawling Maricopa County, which is home to nearly 60 percent of all Arizonans, is like visiting the teenage son of Los Angeles. People who haven't seen it in a while will hardly recognize it because of its exponential growth, but they can see the family resemblance.

In 1990, Arizona had 3.7 million residents, according to U.S. Census statistics. Now, the state's population is approaching 5 million, and nearly 80 percent of that growth has been in Maricopa County, home to the cities of Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe and Mesa. Like L.A., the county is built for automobiles. Seven-lane boulevards lined with palm trees and adorned with fast-food drive-thrus, gas stations and chain stores section off smaller, suburban streets. An intricate network of freeways connects the county, with billboards advertising Young Country and the New Rock. It is the prototypical New West boomtown.

It wasn't always this way. When the real estate market crashed in the late 1980s, Arizona was particularly hard hit. As the price of land plummeted, every savings and loan in the state went belly-up, and the state was hemorrhaging people and jobs. But as the recession lingered into the mid-'90s in neighboring California, Arizona was one of the first states to claim economic recovery, thanks in large part to new plants set up by Intel, Motorola and Honeywell. The state lured businesses and residents alike with aggressive tax cutting throughout the 1990s.

Arizona was one of the epicenters of the savings and loan crash, and its archetypal villain, Charles Keating, called Arizona home. McCain himself was one of the Keating Five; senators whose campaign coffers were padded by Keating -- McCain got over $100,000 -- allegedly in exchange for help in beating back government regulators.

When asked if the Keating Five scandal helped spurn his obsession with campaign finance reform, McCain said, "Sure, experiences [affect] things, but I worked on campaign finance reform in 1987, when I first came to the Senate. I was always involved in the issue. But my interest has steadily increased as the pernicious effects of [soft money] have increased and the Congress has become more gridlocked by it."

It makes sense that a candidate with an independent streak would come from Arizona. The state's very symbol, the three-pronged cactus, even resembles an extended middle finger. The state was the last of the continental United States to be admitted to the union, in 1912, because of the anarchy that reigned in the territory. Barry Goldwater, the iconoclastic father of modern conservatism, hailed from Arizona.

And over the last couple of decades, the state's governor's office has had a revolving door. Raul Castro stepped down as governor in 1977 to become Jimmy Carter's ambassador to Argentina. He was replaced by Wesley Bolin, who died of a heart attack less than a year later, giving Attorney General Bruce Babbit a crack at the job. In 1988, firebrand Evan Mecham was impeached by the Legislature and removed from office, and in 1997, Republican Fife Symington resigned after being convicted of fraud, bequeathing the job to current Gov. Jane Hull.

Now Hull runs a state dominated by women. All four statewide elected officials are women. All but one are Republican. Democrats here have yet to get over the shell-shock of the 1994 campaign, which simultaneously decimated and divided the party here. Arizona political scientist Zachary Smith was recently quoted in the Arizona Republic as saying it "takes something weird" for a Democratic candidate to be successful in the state.

In this context, a conservative Republican who advocates campaign finance reform seems a little less weird. If Arizona is a conservative state, it is also a state full of elected officials who do not fit neatly into labels. Hull showed her own independent streak, blasting McCain in a front-page New York Times piece and endorsing Bush. Arizona is also home to two of the most high-profile gay elected officials in the country: Jim Kolbe, the only openly gay Republican member of the House, and state Rep. Steve May, who is still a member of the Army reserves and gained national attention for violating the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy.

McCain has rallied around Kolbe and May, both of whom are supporting the senator's presidential bid. When McCain found out his colleague was about to be "outed," McCain reportedly told the congressman, "You don't have to say anything more." Kolbe told Salon earlier this year that McCain told him, "It doesn't make a goddamn bit of difference to me if you're gay. You're a good congressman and a good friend."

But if Arizona is full of friends like Kolbe, it's also home to McCain's toughest critics, including the Phoenix New Times and the Arizona Republic. In Vanity Fair, Bernstein made them sound almost cult-like in their attacks on the popular senator. But McCain is certainly not without his warts, and his hometown papers have done a better job than the national media at zeroing in on them.

For all of his talk about campaign finance reform, for instance, the Phoenix New Times recently laid out how many of McCain's most generous donors have business before the mighty Senate Committee on Commerce, Transportation and Science, which McCain has chaired since 1997.

Though he now rails against the Telecommunications Reform Act, the telecommunications industry has donated more than $1 million to McCain's coffers, and another $800,000 came from people who testified before the Commerce Committee since McCain took over the chairmanship.

With the state's booming growth, issues surrounding development, sprawl, environmental protection and water are central to Arizona politics. Many of the state's power brokers are developers, who are trying to appease the state's rapid population boom. Currently, only 13 percent of the land is privately held, and politicians have joined forces with developers to try to free up some of that land for development. "It's really the biggest issue in the state," Hull said.

But while McCain says the environment may be "the sleeper issue of this campaign," he has consistently low ratings from environmental groups during his 17 years in Congress. On a recent Senate vote, which activists dubbed a $66 million giveaway to big oil companies, McCain again tried to have it both ways, according to Anna Aurilio, a staff scientist for U.S. Public Interest Research Group. McCain provided the deciding vote to end a Democratic filibuster against the amendment, but later voted against the amendment itself.

"Our only chance was to stop that with a filibuster [where a measure can be blocked by 40 votes] and McCain knew it. Everybody knew we didn't have the votes to kill the amendment once it came up for a vote. Trent Lott specifically waited for McCain to come back into town to vote on killing the filibuster."

Next page | Striking similarities between McCain and Bush