Q&A: Mr. Mitchell goes to Washington

[Editor's note: The full version of this story appeared in the February issue of PHOENIX magazine.]

TEMPE — Harry Mitchell, 66, just arrived at his modest Tempe home clad in hiking boots, jeans, and a plaid shirt. He was coming from his grandson’s Pop Warner football game.

This is the guy who beat incumbent J.D. Hayworth — a flashy, Republican sportscaster from Scottsdale — to represent a huge swath of the East Valley in Congress.

Mitchell, a Democrat, is a Tempe legacy. He is a second-generation Phoenician who taught high school government for 28 years and served as councilman, mayor and state senator for Tempe.

TZR spent two hours with Mitchell and boiled the interview down to five questions.

TZR: So how did it feel to beat “the bully”?

HM: “It felt great. As the campaign progressed more and more, I really got more determined…

I really believed that the [Arizona Republic] editorial [calling Hayworth a "bully"] was pretty realistic. And I don’t know if it’s anything special to beat him, but it’s important that when you run any contest or and kind of competition, you want to win.

I never entered this thing to lose. I thought all along we had a great shot at it or I’d have never done it. I think, as I hear from people after the election, I accomplished something bigger than I thought I did.

TZR: When you announced your candidacy, you said you were running because “our basic political system…is broken.” What did you mean by that?

HM: No accountability. There was no oversight. It was just a rubber stamp. Stay the course in Iraq. We havd no-bid contracts, we had earmarks. Everything looked like people were using their influence for their friends and their family and their business acquaintances.

TZR: Hayworth was a 12-year incumbent in a district where Republican voters outnumbered Democrats 3-2. How did you beat this guy?

HM: I think elections like this are like job reviews or performance reviews. How’s he done? He got out of touch with his district.

I think there was a pretty clear-cut distinction on the major issues we talked about, and he didn’t want to talk about them. When he did want to talk about [illegal] immigration, for example, he had a very different view than what I did and what I believed the district had. And I think I was right. [Pundits have agreed with Mitchell, saying Hayworth's "get tough" stance on illegal immigrants actually drove voters toward Mitchell.]

For him to say the whole problem was we have to beef up the border and keep people from coming over here — he never did address the root cause of this problem, which is economics. There is work over here and there are workers over there, and we need to figure out a way to match them.

TZR: What stance will you take on Iraq?

HM: I don’t have a specific plan. But I think Congress abdicated its position. It has a constitutional duty for oversight, to ask questions. The president, Congress and Iraqi officials will have to come up with something.

If the President had a plan like that, he never let people know about it. The military did their job. When they came in, they destroyed the Iraqi army, they captured Saddam Hussein. But they forgot to do the political part, the diplomatic part. Once you get rid of the army and the dictator, how do you bring about the peace? [Mitchell said he will support the results of a bipartisan study led by former Secretary of Sate James Baker and former lawmaker Lee Hamilton.]

TZR: Got any good anecdotes from the campaign trail?

HM: Hmm…Oh yeah. I was walking from my car in downtown Tempe — near Z Tejas [bar and grill] — when a guy stopped me and asked, “Are you Harry Mitchell?” [Mitchell has a 35-foot-tall statue named after him in front of city hall. Indeed, Mitchell's so well-known in Tempe that it's like playing Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon.]

I told him, “Yes I am.”

He said, “Just be honest, will ya?”

It really hit me because more than one person has said that to me. People are telling me that. What kind of perception would they have [of Congress] if we actually sat down and had a long discussion about what’s going on in Washington?

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>>Email the editor at aklaw@zoniereport.com.