Investigative Journalist Hopes to Unseat John McCain

Arizona has always liked a fighter and it may have found one in crusading investigative journalist John Dougherty.

A former New Times columnist whose freelance articles have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Arizona Republic, Dougherty is one of four candidates seeking the Democratic nomination for the U.S. Senate in Arizona for the right to take on the winner of the fiercely-contested August 24 Republican primary battle between John McCain and former congressman J. D. Hayworth.

Regarded as one of the country’s most seasoned investigative journalists, Dougherty was named Arizona Journalist of the Year on three occasions and was twice the recipient of the highly-coveted Don Bolles Award for Investigative Reporting. In 1996, he was named to the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism Hall of Fame.

Dougherty’s investigative stories have had a profound impact on Arizona politics almost as long as the party’s perceived frontrunner — a baby-faced, 32-year-old former vice mayor of Tucson — has been alive.

A federal official testifying before the U.S. Senate in 1989, for example, singled Dougherty out as the enterprising reporter whose in-depth stories in the Dayton Daily News first shed light on the infamous Keating Five scandal as part of the larger savings-and-loan crisis of the late 1980’s and early 1990’s — a scandal that eventually cost U.S. taxpayers $250 billion and nearly ended McCain’s political career.

McCain survived the dustup, but not before revelations that the story’s villain, convicted financier Charles H. Keating, Jr., and his associates at the failed Irvine-based Lincoln Savings and Loan, had poured more than $112,000 into the Arizona’s lawmaker’s political campaigns between 1982 and 1987.

McCain wasn’t the freelance journalist’s only target during that period. Dougherty’s hard-hitting reporting on J. Fife Symington’s financial wrongdoings in the 1990’s led to the governor’s indictment and conviction on six counts of fraud and his resignation from office in 1997.

The 53-year-old Dougherty, who’s been exposing corruption and holding Arizona’s most powerful politicians and government agencies accountable for more than a quarter century, promises to bring that same fearless determination and investigative mindset to the U.S. Senate.

“The public has a huge frustration with the government’s inability to do what it says it will do. People want government to hold corporations accountable. Congress has the authority to do that, but instead too many elected officials accept huge campaign donations from special interests and embrace truly cozy relationships with industry. Just look at the catastrophic oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico and the collapse of the financial markets,” he stated in a recent press release.

“Running for the U.S. Senate is an opportunity to bring together everything I’ve been doing as an investigative journalist and apply it to politics at this crucial time in U.S. history,” said Dougherty, who announced his candidacy in late April.

Assuming that McCain survives the GOP primary, the journalist-turned-politician salivates at the opportunity to put the finishing touches on the long public career of Arizona’s senior senator — something he nearly accomplished twenty years ago.

“McCain’s calculated and desperate gambit to appease Arizona’s rabid Right, a move that Jon Stewart aptly described as ‘shorting his soul,’ convinced me it was time to challenge him in his own arena: politics,” wrote Dougherty.

“Senator McCain didn’t learn anything from the Keating Five scandal,” says Dougherty, pointing to McCain’s recent vote against financial reform legislation.

“Once again, McCain showed that his loyalty and concern is for protecting the interests of the financial giants that contribute millions of dollars to his campaign coffers,” he charged. “He should have been defending the security and well-being of average Americans.”

Dougherty could prove to be a feisty and unexpectedly competitive opponent for the senator whose saintly reputation had been temporarily tarnished by the scandal that he unearthed more than two decades ago.

It could be a fascinating match up.

But first he will have to get past a Democratic primary field that includes former Tucson vice mayor Rodney Glassman, ex-state Rep. Cathy Eden, the former head of the Arizona Department of Health Services, and labor organizer Randy Parraz of Phoenix, a civil rights attorney who joined the race shortly after Gov. Jan Brewer signed S.B. 1070 — Arizona’s controversial and stringent immigration legislation — into law on April 23. Little-known William Koller of Tucson is running as a write-in candidate.

Rudy Garcia, a former mayor of Bell Gardens, California, had also briefly sought the Democratic nomination, but apparently didn’t qualify for the primary ballot by the May 26 filing deadline.

Dougherty, who continues to be a regular contributor to the Huffington Post as he aggressively wages his low-budget campaign for the U.S. Senate, said that he entered the race because there was no formidable Democratic candidate on the horizon capable of unseating McCain in November.

There was nobody “prepared to fight,” he said.