I co-sign this Sinema take
Kyrsten Sinema is a fascinating subject to me because she did something rare in the Democratic Party: She threw away her political career over a matter of principle, specifically bad principles. Sinema went to the mat to protect the super-wealthy from taxation and to severely limit the federal government’s ability to negotiate prescription-drug prices.
These policies have no meaningful electoral constituency. She forced herself into a position where, having little chance to win a Democratic primary, she fled the party and is running as an independent (assuming she makes it all the way to the election, which does not strike me as a certainty).
Tara Palmieri reports Sinema was recently being “fêted at a fundraiser in Palm Beach by Steve Schwarzman.”
Who is Steve Schwarzman? He’s a Republican hedge-funder and probably the heart of Sinema’s base. Schwarzman has backed various Republicans, but he does not care about social policy or racism. He is in it for the tax cuts.
In 2010, he compared President Obama’s plan to tax private-equity firms to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. This statement clarified that Schwarzman sees both progressive taxation and Nazism as evil. Which one he saw as more evil was an abstract question until we got a president who liked Nazis and hated taxing the rich, at which point Schwarzman became a major donor.
In the wake of the insurrection, when the business class was suddenly and briefly abandoning Trump, the Guardian reported on his prior support for Trump, and a Schwarzman spokesperson hilariously explained it was “purely about matters related to economic policy and trade, not politics.” It’s not that he’s immoral; he’s just amoral.
Arizona Democrats have been attacking Sinema as ignoring her constituents to cater instead to her superrich pals. This alliance is hardly going to dispel that line of attack.