Michael Bryan

Michael founded BlogForArizona.net as the Howard Dean presidential campaign blog for Arizona in 2003, and has been blogging ever since. The Blog is now coming up on 20 years of continuous publication, a major achievement for any political blog, which usually have the life-spans of mayflies. Michael is an attorney living in Tucson with his wife Lauren. In 2008, Michael remade BlogForArizona into a collaborative project. Michael is now but one of the contributors to the blog and provides editorial and publishing direction in consultation with the Board of Directors and the other authors. If you want to keep up with the latest Arizona and National political news in an entertaining quick hit of news and opinion, check out the BlogForArizona twitter feed, which Mike largely curates and writes. Michael is also an AAPC member who occassionally consults on political campaigns, strategy and communications.

Dr. Carmona, That is Not How You Should Talk About the Laffer Curve

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By Michael Bryan I was generally quite satisfied with Dr. Carmona's very first political debate performance against Jeff Flake. He missed some opportunities, and he was certainly too eager to hug some of Flake's positions, but he acquitted himself decently. One flub that stood out, however, was his answer to moderator Ted Simons' question regarding … Read more

Jeff Flake Appears to Agree with Cutting the Federal Government by 50%, And Weird Things About the Great Recession

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By Michael Bryan

FlakeconfusedI had a close listen to the Carmona / Flake (and Victor) debate on KAET recently. It wasn't terribly interesting or enlightening, I'm afraid. Carmona did OK for a political debate neophyte, with just one major slip that I'll discuss in a later post.

I can't embed a clip of the C-SPAN feed, unfortunately, but I created a custom clip on their website that you can access here. The clip highlights Flake's ridiculous answer to moderator Ted Simons' question about lessons learned from the Great Recession.

But before even getting to that, it is interesting to listen closely to the end of Libertarian candidate Mark Victor's statement at the very beginning of the clip.

Victor said, "… we need to cut government by 50% just to get started." Immediately after, a voice says "That's right." It was rather faint, and not entirely clear who said it in the video. It's clear it wasn't Victor, and it certainly wasn't Carmona or Simons, so I assumed it was Flake, but I wasn't entirely sure.

So I wrote to the moderator, Ted Simons, who kindly responded to my inquiry as follows:

"Regarding your question regarding a 50% cut in govt comment during AZ Horizon's debate: I can't be sure about this but it appears it was Rep. Flake who said, "that's right," considering both Mr. Victor and I turned to him. But again, I'm not at all positive about that. And my impression is that the remark was in response to more of what Mr. Victor was saying about cutting govt and not just the 50% remark. Not much help, I know, but it's the best I can do for you…"

So the moderator at the table also thinks it was likely Flake who seconded Victor's rather radical notion that we need to cut government by 50% to start. Though, charitably, Simons interprets Flake's shout-out as more generalized agreement with Victor, not specifically the 50% cut. I don't need to be so charitable; nor do you.