My question is why would a freshman congressman hire a democrat operative?
I’m not in Arizona but will note that Karamargin had moved on to being Pima Community College’s Vice Chancellor for Communication 7 months after Jared Lee Loughner shot and wounded Gifford (6 killed, wounded 13).
A story at the Huffington Post (fwiw) quotes an anonymous friend of Giffords as saying that McSally is working to appear moderate (but they’re not buying it).
My question also. I wouldn’t hire a former Democrat politico to scrub my toilets.
They seem to be generic and interchangeable. All they have to do is change their hat.
A good HOR rep needs a staff that deals with the needs of constituents competently. I don’t have any problem with a rep choosing staff that is experienced and qualified at that.
My thoughts exactly. Why would McSally risk having this new hire become a leak directly into the Rat cloakroom?
It sounds like she hiring him to do primarily constituent work, I imagine most of that stuff is non-partisan and non-ideological. He would be familiar with much of the issues that their constituents would have.
My congressman is an idiot, but I’ve called his office several times and been very impressed with the people he has working for him.
I never really had a problem I needed help with, so I can’t judge on that. But he does keep getting re-elected so my guess is his office is pretty good with that stuff.
Damned good question!
Depends on how high up the strategy chain the operative is. When my district's House seat flipped D to R in the '94 Gingrich takeover (and has never looked back), the new Congressman hired some of the Dem committee staff for day-to-day functions, one of whom was a former student of mine. She was glad for the job, he was glad to tap into her insider knowledge, and she had enough integrity (well, she had taken my Ethics class :> ) not to undermine his efforts, until she could get a job more to her ideological bent. Incidentally, she ended up marrying a back-home lawyer, and is still on the wrong side of the aisle, in spite of some efforts to the contrary.