Arizona and its most watched-over daughter, Gabby Giffords, easily had the largest presence at the State of the Union address. It wasn’t just the empty chair; it was the entire intramural seating chart. The short, subdued ovations. The lack of score settling in the speech or outbursts from the gallery. Even Representative Michele Bachmann, in her Tea Party retort to President Obama’s speech, failed to leap off her usual rhetorical cliffs. A vow to “proclaim liberty throughout the land” was as close as she came. Other Arizonans were in attendance as Michelle Obama’s guests. Some had been at the First Lady’s side in Tucson a few weeks earlier, like the family of the little girl who was murdered in the Jan. 8 shooting spree and the young hero of that chaotic crime scene. But there was a new face of Arizonan compassion as well: Diego Vasquez, an aspiring aerospace engineer from Laveen who helped design an award-winning wheelchair after seeing a disabled friend struggle in school. See the scenes of those living in danger along the Rio Grande river.> Giffords watched all of this from her hospital bed in Houston, and one wonders whether she was able to appreciate the irony that this bipartisan restraint — no matter how fleeting — should be inspired by Arizona, a state whose politics are, well, unrestrained. Arizona seems to have adopted a role as the fingernails on the chalkboard of American politics: screeching, cringe-inducing, impossible to ignore. And whatever the amount of comity that hit Congress on the night of Jan. 25, Arizona is going to need much more of it. Arizona is, after all, the Grand Canyon State. Its defining topographical feature is literally a divide. The politics of the state, not just in these past few weeks but in the past few years, has been all about division, as though every argument we are having as a nation plays out there on a breathtaking scale. The budget is a shambles, the schools are among the worst in the country, the governor is accused of running “death panels” for cutting off funding for organ transplants for some Medicaid patients. Representative Giffords’ Tea Party — backed opponent held a “Get on target for victory” shoot-out at a gun range as a campaign event. Rallies against a controversial immigration bill last year featured so many tearful calls to prayer and accusations of Nazism that it seemed like an all-Hispanic version of the Glenn Beck show. “It’s as bad as I’ve seen in 40 years of observing Arizona politics,” says Bruce Merrill, a professor emeritus at Arizona State University. “We have so many real problems, and all our leadership has done is [pursue] polarizing issues using very strident language.”
