Two days ago a news surface item surfaced in which Arizona governor Jan Brewer was said to have been engaged in “intense conversation”—possibly a passionate disagreement—with President Barack Obama on a Phoenix tarmac. The AP pictures below suggest more was going on than just a friendly handshake:
Arizona Governor Jan Brewer and President Barack Obama on Phoenix Tarmac in January 2012 | AP
Time Magazine has Brewer saying the mini-dustup was over statements she made in her autobiographical book Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight…To Secure America’s Border (title is frankly too long to post neatly here), which she says Obama found “disturbing.” Brewer is famous among some and infamous among others for her efforts to crack down on illegal immigration, and the legislative methods by which that end has been pursued.
Specifically, says Time, Obama took issue with Brewer’s retelling of an incidents at Arizona State University and later at the White House. In an interview (see Time link), Brewer explains that at the first ASU incident, Obama blew her off. On the second meeting at the White House, Brewer was there to discuss immigration but says of the meeting, “I felt a little bit like I was being lectured to, and I was a little kid in a classroom, if you will, and he was this wise professor and I was this little kid, and this little kid knows what the problem is and I felt minimized to say the least.”
As for their most recent tarmac encounter:
“I said to him, you know, I have always respected the office of the president and that the book is what the book is,” she told reporters Wednesday. She said Obama complained that she described him as not treating her cordially.
“I said that I was sorry that he felt that way. Anyway, we’re glad he’s here, and we’ll regroup.”
The two have agreed to meet again to discuss things further at some point in the future.
Brewer’s book which is ranked at or near the top of Amazon for political and governmental categories, and is currently the 7th-best selling book there overall. Publisher Broadside Books says this in promotion of “Scorpions” (abbreviated):
Sometime after dark on March 27, 2010, Arizona rancher Robert Krentz was found dead next to his four-wheeler on the grounds of his ranch on the Arizona-Mexico border. Krentz and his dog, Blue, had been missing since that morning. They were last heard from when he radioed his brother to say that he’d found an illegal alien on the property and was going to offer him assistance. The man Krentz encountered that day shot and killed him and his dog, without warning, before escaping to Mexico.
It’s difficult to overstate the impact of Krentz’s death, which turned the issue of Arizona’s unsecured border—a crisis that the federal government had repeatedly ignored—into a national concern. As Arizona sheriff Larry Dever said in his testimony before the Senate Homeland Security Committee, “We cannot sit by while our citizens are terrorized, robbed, and murdered by ruthless and desperate people who enter our country illegally.” This momentum helped pass SB 1070, a bill that authorizes local law enforcement under certain conditions to question persons reasonably suspected of being illegal aliens, which Governor Jan Brewer and the state legislature had been working on for months. With the passage of this controversial bill, the state of Arizona became ground zero in the impassioned debate over illegal immigration. The Democrats and the media went into overdrive, denouncing the state and its governor as racists and Nazis.
