We do remember who made the, um, amazing Jan Brewer governor of Arizona, don't we?

Is this some of that Hope 'n' Change we were proffered? Oh wait, no, it's Hope 'n' Crosby -- even less funny. Never mind.

by Ken

Just to be clear, for the benefit of readers who may not be totally up to date on Howie's ongoing coverage of the outer limits of loony-tune candidates in this election cycle, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer is hardly the loopiest of them, bearing in mind just how high the bar for looopiness has been set -- and keeps being raised. One interesting difference, though, is that "Gov." in front of her name. Yessir, ladies and gents, our Jan is actually the sitting governor of one of the states of our United States of America!

At least as of this moment we can offer the mitigating qualification that she wasn't elected governor. It remains to be seen whether this will still be sayable come November 3.

In the more narrowly targeted note of shock regarding our Jan's recent debate "performance" I added to Howie's broader-themed pommeling of the accidental governor, I focused on all that dead air she produced, just standing there saying nothing -- most amazingly in her opening statement. This genuinely blew my mind, in a political season that's shaping up to be our craziest ever, and consequently I'm doing my darnedest to render my mind unblowable. The thing is, how do you go into a high-stakes political debate not knowing what the heck you're going to say in your opening statement?

I still don't get that. But as I said then, "It's not clear that Arizona voters will exact any price for the fact that their incumbent governor apparently has nothing to say either about the job she's done or the job she hopes to do if elected."

Our Jan did get elected secretary of state, though, and as I also wrote:

The attention that has been focused on the Arizona governor's race thanks mostly to Governor Brewer's debate performance has belatedly set me to thinking more about how exactly she came to be governor. Which takes me back to the, um, curious way President-elect Obama went about filling the high-level positions in his administration. I think we should talk about that one of these days.

I don't mean to make a big thing of this. I just want to make sure there's some note on the record somewhere concerning one of the decided unusualnesses of the formative phase of the Obama administration, namely the convulsions caused by the number of high-ranking Democrats plucked out of office in the assembling of the cabinet.

Of course to some extent this is to be expected when the out-of-power party retakes the White House. After all, aren't its governors and U.S. senators among its foremost talent banks? Still, nobody that I can recall could recall such a shock to a party's power structure.

The talk at the time, I'm sure we all recall was, of Abraham Lincoln's "team of rivals" -- all those onetime Republican rivals brought into the Lincoln administration and forced to work with one another. The people who most pointedly rejected the analogy were the Lincoln scholars, and sure enough, it has become increasingly clear that those folks were brought into the government to eliminate any potential outside power bases.

To focus for a moment just on two snatched-away governors, while neither Arizona's Janet Napolitano nor Kansas's Kathleen Sebelius is DWT's kind of Democrat, in their home states they were prime movers in revived state parties that were offering electorally serious alternatives to the increasingly whacked-out Republicans. And I have to say, my progressive friends in Arizona had a lot of respect for their Democratic governor -- and once it became clear that Napolitano was being considered seriously for a cabinet job, they had a great deal of dread at what would happen once she was gone. Sure enough, the Arizona Democratic Party has virtually collapsed, and the Kansas one is in a mess. Hey, it's a good thing that one of the first things that political mastermind Master Rahm Emanuel did when he got his hands on the controls was to dismantle Howard Dean's 50-state strategy.

Someday we might want to run down the individual cases to appreciate the depth and breadth of the damage done to, or at least the inherent structural weakness of, the Democratic Party in states where high-level officeholders were suddenly out of the picture, which extended even to the new president's and vice president's own states. And like so many of those other Obama appointees, they have precious little to show for their time in the executive branch.

In Napolitano's case, whether or not it accords with her own views on immigration (the feeling of the people who knew her record back home is that it doesn't), she has presided over an immigration policy worse than the Bush regime's, apparently built around the common administration delusion that pandering to Republican crackpots and sociopaths will somehow soften up, or prevent the hardening of, opposition to meaningful immigration reform. As with most everything else this adminstration has touched, the reality has been pretty much the exact opposite.

And Sebelius, as HHS secretary serving in the job that for its intended designee, Tom Daschle, apparently was going to be a position of real power, doesn't seem to have had much to contributed except standing firm during the health care "debate" to insist, any time anyone dared to mention any kind of single-payer insurance system, no way, no how.

That's quite a record: exposing if not actually creating chaos and rot in state Democratic parties while rendering the precious new executive appointees useless if not worse. (One shining exception: Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a corporate shill who may actually be more ineffectual than his Bush regime predecessors. I'm sure Master Rahm misses him in the Senate, where he had the potential to develop into another Lieberman or Ben Nelson, but the payoff at Interior has been spectacular, at least as measured by the standard of corporate whoredom and thuggery.

(Even now, with the prospect of Master Rahm returning to Chicago to run for mayor, the accounts I'm hearing suggest that Jim Messina has developed himself into Rahm by Any Other Name. More importantly, I've yet to see any evidence that anything the Master has done in any way conflicts with the wishes of the president he serves.)

Since in the Rahm universe Arizona is apparently conceded to Republicans, in the way that the Great Powers in colonial days conceded spheres of influence to rival powers in order to protect their own, Arizona Democrats have been left to fend for themselves. Well, they certainly wouldn't want the only kind of help Master Rahm knows how to provide in the exercise of party-building. But we shouldn't forget that the decision to make Jan Brewer governor of Arizona was made by the Obama brain trust.

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