I know the Republican incumbent, state Rep. Todd Clodfelter of Tucson’s LD10. I listened as he told a woman at a town hall who was afraid to send her children to school that we would all soon need to carry guns to defend ourselves. I still feel ashamed that I did not go stand next to that mother and challenge his vision of Arizona.
Remember the coverage of Todd Clodfelter’s display — on the floor of the Arizona House of Representatives — of his laptop computer’s screensaver depicting what most of us think of as “The Confederate Flag”? He is immune to the argument, quoted in a Washington Post interview with a Civil War Historian, that “You can’t filter out the racism and leave what’s pure and historical in the flag, because that purity doesn’t exist. Some things are so primitively stained or tarnished by history that they can never be set side. The flag is a perfect example.” Clodfelter defended his use of the flag as “acceptable” imagery. This is the Clodfelter I know.