Dan Spahr is a Jingo

Many of you probably don’t even know who Dan Spahr is. That’s a
symptom of his less-than-memorable campaign for Ward 4 City Council
against Shirley Scott.

Once he was quite-predictably crushed at the polls, I never expected
to give him another thought, unless he got it into his head to take on
another kamikaze political mission in the future.

But then, driving down 1^st Avenue on my way home from
work, I spotted a not-yet-removed Dan Spahr bumper sticker. I hadn’t
seen any of these during the campaign, so for all I know, I just got
lucky and had stumbled across Dan’s own car.

But what stuck me was the slogan:

Yes, the font sizes are a reasonably accurate reflection of the
ratio of the font sizes on the sticker. And on his web-site you’ll note
the prominence of the American flag – not the Arizona flag, nor the
Tucson city flag.

Just what office did Dan think he was running for? The City Council
has no power to support or undermine our troops, except in a purely symbolic way. The issue is
completely irrelevant to the a race for City Council.

Then I realized it: in Dan Spahr’s mind, a City Council race has
everything to do with supporting the troops, because Dan Spahr is a
jingoistic idiot. And his campaign was focused on appealing to
jingoistic idiots, which might have something to do with why he lost.

Now, I will allow that perhaps some misguided jingoistic idiot
supporter of Dan Spahr maybe went off the reservation and created his
own asinine jingoistic bumper sticker that really had nothing to do
with Dan Spahr’s doomed campaign. But that doesn’t seem likely.

What seems much more likely is that Dan Spahr, at a loss for
anything actually relevant to politics or policy in the city of Tucson
with which to define his campaign, reached immediately for the last
refuge of scoundrels. Thus was born the "Support Our Troops" city
council race bumper sticker.

So if you remember nothing else about Dan Spahr — and it seems very
unlikely that you would — remember this: he’s a jingoistic idiot. And
that’s really all you need to know.