Elefino

                                          Kyrsten Sinema provided this image to azcentral.com

Having lived in Arizona for a while now, thanks to circumstances too complicated to go into, friends elsewhere assume I have the inside scoop on the enigma that's been bedeviling political pundits for weeks:

What does Kyrsten Sinema want?

The answer reminds me of an old joke: 

What do you get when you cross an elephant and a rhinoceros?

Elefino!

We were here when Sinema was first elected to the U.S. Senate two years ago. She was a mystery then, too, but just being a Democrat in this sun-baked, gun-totin', red-meat red state seemed enough. She was reported to be a Green Party organizer riding the wave of Bernie Sanders' unexpected popularity in the state.

Sinema beat incumbent Martha McSally, a former combat pilot who had the misfortune of being beaten again in the next election by Arizona's next Democratic senator, Mark Kelly. He upped her by being not only a former pilot himself, but an astronaut. 

Martha McSally seemed more like someone who should be piloting a broom in the sky, but her backstory included being a sexual abuse survivor who made something of herself in the military, then took the Sarah Palin low road. I actually started feeling sorry for her after she was castigated on the tarmac by Donald Trump on a 2020 campaign stop.

But now it's Sinema incurring the dismay and wrath from people at my end of the political spectrum who used to reserve our rage and animus for the T-word himself. Rather than knee-jerking my way into the chorus, I'm looking to the landscape for clues to help unravel the conundrum of the blond, 42-year-old Ironman competitor who's currently, in league with West Virginia's Joe Manchin, paralyzing the Senate, jeopardizing Joe Biden's agenda and possibly paving the way for a return to Der Trumph.

The landscape reminds me that Arizona is a desert. It happens to be incredibly green and gorgeous at the moment, in full-bloom glory thanks to wetter-than-usual monsoon season, but usually it's not like this. Usually it's hot. Fry an egg on the sidewalk hot. Sun like a blowtorch hot. 

It's desert and members of the animal kingdom who live here, including the two-legged ones, are desert dwellers. Lotsa reptiles and poisonous insects among the mammals. Tough. Resourceful. Squinty. Pragmatic. While Sinema's political hero John McCain embodied this independent spirit that earned him a label as a maverick, the state cut its earlier political icons like Barry Goldwater and Mo Udall from the same leather.

Add the self-contained (and self-absorbed) discipline required to be a triathlete to the thick skin needed to survive an AZ July, and you don't have the answer to the Sinema riddle – but see a unique life form that doesn't fit comfortably into the contours of the current Democratic Party. That party has become a bigger tent than the party's leaders were expecting … or seem to have a clue how to manage.

Considering that Sinema herself isn't fond of giving interviews, I turned to Google, Wikipedia and the digital morgues of The New York Times and the Washington Post for help … with tantalizing but inconclusive results. 

There's her novelistic origin story of growing up “homeless” in a converted gas station without plumbing or electricity, although investigative journalists have raised questions about details in that account. She graduated from high school at 16 as valedictorian, and finished the University of Arizona two years later.

Since becoming a senator, she's had plenty of meetings and fund-raisers with corporations hardly fond of Biden's tax policies. So you can throw good old-fashioned graft and corruption into the mix.

Does any of this explain Sinema's swing to the right? Or is she having her own Sarah Palin moment, seduced Narcissus-like by the media mirror image cast back at her?

Elefino. But I don't think it's that simple.

My guess that Biden's apparent Waterloo in Congress right now stems from structural defects in the foundations of democracy itself, unearthed by technology's relentless surge forward, remolding the future in its algorithms.

The old coalitions that forged the Democratic Party don't work if workers don't want to unite behind the belief that a greater good is better than their individual identities as consumers, intoxicated by Trumpian snake oil labeled “Freedom.” 

The new Democratic Party doesn't work if its leaders don't believe in a greater good either, maintaining the chastity of their woke purity, refusing to grow into the maturity that acknowledges American democracy is built on a foundation of hypocrisy and compromise.

(The difference between Democrats and Republicans is that Democrats shed crocodile tears when their hypocrisy is revealed, while the Republicans arrogantly revel in their own, using it as a stick to poke in their opponents eye whenever possible.)

The previous president made a strong case that Americans would rather be entertained than governed. He's still demonstrating that the rule of law is a flimsy barrier to his toxic rage. He's happy to infect us all with his disease and leave the corpses where they fall rather than admit he's a loser.

For some reason, the lies he spins have more traction in the American psyche than his opponents' attempts to contain him. Until they can figure out why, he continues to hold the upper hand.

As for the fate of Kyrsten Sinema … or Joe Biden behind her?

Elefino.