The Democrats’ candidate for U.S. Senate in Arizona, Richard Carmona, has an impressive résumé. He was raised in Spanish Harlem in the fifties and sixties, coming from Puerto Rican descent. He dropped out of school when he was 16 and enlisted in the army. In Vietnam he became a medic for the Special Forces and earned a Purple Heart and Bronze Star. He then worked his way up from the Bronx Community College all the way to getting a medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco. Along the way, he worked as a paramedic and a registered nurse. He became the CEO of a hospital and even taught medicine at the University of Arizona. And then President George W. Bush appointed him to be the nation’s Surgeon General. When he retired from that position, he let the Bush administration have it:
On July 10, 2007, Carmona, along with former Surgeons General C. Everett Koop and David Satcher, testified before the United States House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about political and ideological interference with the Surgeon General’s mission. Carmona accused the Bush Administration of preventing him from speaking out on certain public health issues such as embryonic stem cell research, global climate change, emergency contraception, and abstinence-only sex education, where the Administration’s political stance conflicted with scientific and medical opinion.
Carmona also testified that the Bush Administration had attempted for years to “water down” his report on the dangers of secondhand smoke and pressured him not to testify in the tobacco industry’s racketeering trial: “Anything that doesn’t fit into the political appointees’ ideological, theological or political agenda is ignored, marginalized or simply buried.” According to Carmona, he was even ordered not to attend the Special Olympics because the event was sponsored by the Kennedy family, and was told to mention President Bush three times on every page of his speeches. The Washington Post subsequently identified William R. Steiger as the Bush Administration official who had blocked release of Carmona’s report on global health because it conflicted with the Administration’s political priorities.
Part of Carmona’s appeal is that he isn’t a politician or a career partisan. If he’s running as a Democrat, part of that can explained by his horrible experience serving in a Republican administration. Provided he can handle himself on the stump, he’s a strong recruit for the Democrats, but they kind of screwed up his launch. On Wednesday, he was just appointed to head an inquiry into the mistreatment of soldiers’ remains at Dover Air Force Base, but he announced his Senate candidacy on Thursday, and had to step down from the commission on Friday under pressure from the Pentagon.
His likely opponent is Rep. Jeff Flake. Flake is an interesting character who has a too-rare capability to think for himself. Much like Barry Goldwater, he combines a certain extremism with some moderate positions. He voted to invade Iraq but then voted against some of the later appropriations to fund the war, having come to have doubts about the effort. He voted to end the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy. He’s worked to increase legal immigration and create a guest worker program. And, although he has supported the PATRIOT Act, he has successfully passed amendments that made it less awful. At the same time, he’s an anti-earmark extremist (his signature issue), he’s voted to amend the Constitution to ban gay marriage, and his record on social issues in general is horrible. And, for whatever it’s worth, he comes from a prominent Mormon family.
It should be an interesting match-up between two unorthodox candidates. The winner could very well determine which party controls the Senate.
