What’s Wrong With Kyrsten Sinema?

In 2003, Joe Lieberman, at the time one of the worst Democratic senators, traveled to Arizona to campaign for his party’s presidential nomination and was regularly greeted by antiwar demonstrators. “He’s a shame to Democrats,” said the organizer of a protest outside a Tucson hotel, a left-wing social worker named Kyrsten Sinema. “I don’t even know why he’s running. He seems to want to get Republicans voting for him — what kind of strategy is that?”

It was a good question, and one that many people would like to ask Sinema herself these days...she’s just acting as an obstructionist, seeming to bask in the approbation of Republicans who will probably never vote for her.

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...what really makes her different from McCain is that nobody seems to know what she stands for.

...She voted against the Trump tax cuts in the House but now seems to oppose undoing any of them. According to The New York Times, she’s “privately told colleagues she will not accept any corporate or income tax rate increases.”
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...I think it’s entirely possible that Sinema’s motives are sincere, because she’s come to believe in bipartisanship for its own sake, divorced from any underlying policy goals. To understand why, it’s worth reading Sinema’s one book-length explication of her political philosophy, her 2009 “Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win — and Last.”...

In “Unite and Conquer,” Sinema describes entering the Republican-controlled Arizona State House as a strident progressive, accomplishing nothing, being miserable and then recalibrating so that she could collaborate with her Republican colleagues. ...

Sinema describes finding self-actualization [eyeroll] in learning to “open up my own ways of thinking to embrace a much larger possibility than the strict party-line rhetoric I’d been using.” She figured out how to have meetings with lobbyists that were “relaxed and comfortable,” whether or not they agreed. Her “new ethos” helped her to get more done and, “perhaps most importantly,” be “much happier,” she writes.

“Unite and Conquer” was about operating in the minority, not exercising power...The bipartisanship that was once a source of liberation for her seems to have become a rigid identity.

“I think she’s just really invested in that self-image, personally, as someone who stands up to her party,” said Emily Kirkland, the executive director of Progress Arizona, a progressive group that worked to elect Sinema to the Senate. There’s a difference, it turns out, between being a maverick and being a narcissist.

Okay, now, actually I find this sort of interesting. I would tell Sinema that to her face as I slowly squeezed my hands around her neck to strangle her. So she had an epiphany between opposing Lieberman (who, by the way, is the last presidential candidate whose bumpersticker graced my rust bucket. True story) and her first few years in the Arizona senate when she was a "strident progressive" but got nothing done and was "miserable." The latter and Sinema's mind expansion in "finding self-actualization" in bipartisanship and "perhaps most importantly" becoming "much happier" informs Michelle Goldberg's conclusion that Sinema is a narcissist. 

I am trying to tap into faint echoes I hear in my brain of similar things. I have re-read parts of Churchill's World War II and he stated to a Conservative Party conference that for four hundred years it had been consistent British government policy to oppose whichever nation on the continent was the strongest in favor of a coalition of the weaker to check the dominant. It was a policy completely without national favoritism, it could be Germany today, France one hundred years ago, and Germany tomorrow. The only calculus was who was dominant. That is the only example I can call up. It struck me as odd when I first read it and then very wise indeed. Now, is Sinema doing something similar? From "she’s come to believe in bipartisanship for its own sake, divorced from any underlying policy goals" I get a whiff of that, a strategy of alliance with the weaker, right or wrong, divorced from policy. But Britain's policy was about policy, Sinema's seems to be anti-policy. Well...Churchill immediately allied with the hated Soviet Union for one reason only, to oppose Hitler. That was not policy-consistent; it was, however power-policy consistent. There is some of that in Sinema. It may be. Sinema is to me what Churchill said of Russia, "a riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma." It may be that the only lens through which Kyrsten Sinema has come to view her role in politics is the lens of power. She sees the executive and both legislative branches nominally controlled by one party and she is going to put her hand on the scale of the weaker party. That party could be anti-American, anti-democratic, pro-Christian theocratoc, pro-COVID, but we only got one other party! and she's not going to let the nominally stronger, infinitely preferable party have its way. It's not bipartisanship so much as anti-partisanship. I hesitate to be generous-minded to Sinema because I hate her and would like to squeeze until her face turns purple and her eyes bulge out and even giving Sinema that, there is still the quiddity of narcissism. Power-policy cannot be found in voting against the Trump tax cuts, privately telling colleagues she will vote for no tax increases, corporate or personal, even those that merely undo the Trump tax cuts, and refusing to tell her constituents and the nation the same thing publicly. That is devious narcissism. So I would like to talk to Sinema about this, she will not be able to converse back as her vocal chords will be nonfunctional.