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This Senator Is The GOP's Anti-Trump
Topic Started: Sep 3 2015, 02:58 AM (41 Views)
Webster
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Wasatch Storyteller & Resident Forum Curmudgeon
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Yahoo News: This Senator Is The GOP's Anti-Trump

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The man in the last row leaned back in his folding chair and crossed his arms. He was not pleased. “Sen. Flake is lucky he’s not up for reelection,” the man whispered. “He’s damn lucky. This is going to be a tough year. I mean, look at the momentum Donald Trump has!”

It was yet another 100-degree late-August Arizona morning, and Tom Purdon, a 78-year-old retired ob-gyn with a Band-Aid on his nose and leather loafers on his feet, had come to the East Social Center in Green Valley, just outside of Tucson, to see his senator, Jeff Flake, hold a town hall with the good people of the Grand Canyon State.

Purdon voted for Flake in 2012, the year the five-term congressman from Mesa graduated to the Senate. But recently Purdon has been regretting his decision. Elsewhere, Trump, the Republican presidential frontrunner, was preparing to rally 20,000 supporters in Mobile, Ala. Jeb Bush was dismissing the U.S.-born children of foreign citizens as “anchor babies.” And the rest of the GOP’s oxygen-deprived candidates were competing to say the most outlandish, attention-getting things their consultants could conjure up — about President Obama, about gay marriage, about our neighbors to the north.
Yet here was Flake, refusing to follow the script. In 2013, he joined the bipartisan Gang of Eight to craft a comprehensive reform bill that included a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Earlier this August, he was the only Republican accompanying Secretary of State John Kerry to Cuba to preside over the reopening of the U.S. embassy after a 54-year diplomatic freeze. But what has really worried Flake’s most conservative constituents is the Iran deal. When the GOP senators signed a letter to the leaders of Iran meant to undermine the White House’s ongoing nuclear negotiations with the Islamic Republic, only seven members of their caucus declined to add their names — including Flake. The Arizonan vowed to consider the deal with an open mind, and for more than a month, even as every other Senate Republican came out against it and anti-Flake attack ads began airing on Arizona TV, that’s exactly what he did.

Eventually, on Aug. 15, Flake announced that he could not, in the end, bring himself to support Obama’s Iran pact. The decision made no one happy — not the president, who’d lost his last chance for bipartisan backing, and certainly not the Green Valley conservatives who were now listening to Flake insist, in some of his first public remarks on the subject, that it was “a much closer call than people want to make it out to be.”

Near the front of the room, a short bald man with a mustache, a yellow polo shirt, and a Brooklyn accent stood up and pointed at the senator.
“I’d like to know why Congress is allowing this president to capitulate to these terrorist states!” he shouted. “We elected you folks to stop him! You begged for our money and votes, you got elected, and now you let him do whatever he wants to do! I’d like to know why.”

“Well said!” Purdon cheered. “There’s a question!” Then he shifted in his seat and whispered again. “Everybody’s afraid of race,” he said. “That’s why.”

When the applause died down, Flake — who, at 52, with his ochre hair and quarterback’s jaw, looks more like an actor playing a senator than an actual senator — attempted to answer the man’s question. “I obviously have my differences with this president on domestic policy and foreign policy,” he said. “I have some agreement with him, too…”

“Why aren’t we getting our hostages back?” yelled the man in the yellow shirt. “Why aren’t we stopping this guy? You have the ability to do this!”

A chorus of “yeah!”s went up from the crowd.

“We’ve pushed back where we can,” Flake replied. He paused for a second. “And let me just say this. There are some who say that this president is trying to weaken America as a calculated effort…”

“Yes!” Purdon said to himself.

“… and I don’t buy that,” Flake continued. “I disagree.”

-Read more: https://www.yahoo.com/politics/this-senator-is-the-gops-anti-trump-128056697531.html
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