From Mother Jones
As she likes to tell anybody who'll listen, Susana Martinez, the governor of New Mexico, didn't start out a Republican. She and her husband, Chuck, like most everyone else in Las Cruces, had always been Democrats. But she'd long dreamed of running for office, and when word got out that she had her eyes on the district attorney's seat, two local Republican activists asked her to lunch. At the meeting, the story goes, her suitors didn't talk about party affiliation or ideology. They zeroed in on issues—taxes, welfare, gun rights, the death penalty. Afterward, Martinez got into the car, turned to her husband, and said, "I'll be damned, we're Republicans."
It's a tidy little anecdote, and Martinez has put it to good use. During her prime-time speech at the 2012 Republican National Convention, the biggest stage of her 18-year political career, the I'll be damned punch line brought the crowd to its feet, getting more cheers than anything said by the party's presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.
It's not hard to see why the story is appealing: It suggests that Republican ideas can win over voters, perhaps especially voters who look like Martinez. If only those voters saw through pesky Democratic talking points like the "War on Women" and recognized what the Republican Party actually stands for, the logic goes, they would embrace the party. Just like Susana Martinez and her husband did.
These are trying times for Republicans in search of inspiration. Sure, it looks like they have a shot to take back the Senate. But if the escalating civil war between the establishment and the "wacko bird" tea party wing doesn't tear the GOP in two, changing demographics threaten to push it toward extinction. Every four years, the party turns in poor showings with young people and cedes more ground among unmarried women and Latinos—the fastest-growing parts of the country's population. In the 1988 presidential election, minorities made up just 15 percent of voters; by 2012, that number had risen to 28 percent, and they supported Obama by a 62-point margin. "Devastatingly," the party's 2012 post-mortem concluded, "we have lost the ability to be persuasive with, or welcoming to, those who do not agree with us."
No wonder, then, that many see Martinez, who turns 55 in July, as the party's future. Fox News host Greta Van Susteren touts her "great resume": America's first Latina governor. Former district attorney of a border county. Guardian of her mentally disabled sister. Tax cutter, gun owner, daughter of a sheriff's deputy. The Koch brothers invited her to speak at one of their secretive donor enclaves. Karl Rove singled her out in Time's list of last year's 100 most influential people as a "reform-minded conservative Republican." The Washington Post put her at the top of a list of likely 2016 vice presidential candidates; Romney has boosted her as a presidential contender. "She plugs every hole we've got as a party, and she's got a record to match," says Ford O'Connell, an adviser to the 2008 McCain campaign.
In the media, Martinez is often compared to Sarah Palin—"Susana Barracuda" read the title of a recent profile—a sassy small-town politician with national aspirations, an anti-Washington message, and an everywoman appeal (she loves Taco Bell, shops at Ross Dress for Less, and watches Dancing With the Stars). Her dead certain, with-me-or-against-me governing style draws comparisons to another Southwestern governor who made the leap from the statehouse to the White House, George W. Bush.
But perhaps the best comparison is to New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie. Both are former prosecutors and Republican governors in blue states. They serve side by side on the money-raising juggernaut known as the Republican Governors Association (RGA), and they campaigned together during Christie's 2013 reelection campaign; "Is This Your 2016 Republican Ticket?" was a typical headline.
Their public personas, however, differ in an important way. Christie has made Jersey brashness central to his presentation; Martinez, on the other hand, "doesn't posture, doesn't engage in harsh rhetoric," as one of her fundraisers put it. Since her election in 2010, she and her team have meticulously cultivated the image of a well-liked, bipartisan, warm-hearted governor by avoiding tough interviews and putting her in photo ops greeting veterans, reading to kids, or cutting ribbons. "This administration is very disciplined," says New Mexico pollster Brian Sanderoff.
Despite numerous requests, the governor and her aides declined to comment for this piece. But previously unreleased audio recordings, text messages, and emails obtained by Mother Jones reveal a side of Martinez the public has rarely, if ever, seen. In private, Martinez can be nasty, juvenile, and vindictive. She appears ignorant about basic policy issues and has surrounded herself with a clique of advisers who are prone to a foxhole mentality.
Martinez doesn't look like any of the governors who came before her, and members of her inner circle sometimes feel that she has been subject to unfair attacks. Jay McCleskey, her closest aide, once sent a text message complaining about an opponent's negative mailing: "They're trying to keep the brown girl down!!!"
Still, interviews with former Martinez aides, state lawmakers, Democratic and Republican officials, fundraisers, and donors show a governor whose prosecutorial style and vindictiveness have estranged her from leaders in her own party and from the Democratic lawmakers she must work with to get anything done. Martinez and her staff, they say, have isolated themselves in her fourth-floor office inside the modest state capitol known as the Roundhouse. As one major Republican donor in New Mexico puts it, "They've got this Sherman's march to the sea mentality, burning everything in sight until they get to the finish."
Martinez grew up among fighters. Her father, Jake, boxed in the Marines, served as a deputy sheriff in El Paso, and later started his own private security company. Her mother was a telephone operator and bookkeeper. Susie, the youngest of three, worked for her dad as a teenager, patrolling the parking lot and guarding the register at church bingo nights. The .357 Smith and Wesson Magnum she packed was, she once said, "bigger than the hip bone I was carrying it on."
The Martinezes were Democrats, and Jake was active in El Paso politics (though his daughter proudly notes that he voted for Reagan). He and Susie volunteered on campaigns, stuffing envelopes and walking precincts. When a teacher at Riverside High School asked about Susie's career dreams, she mentioned one day running for mayor. "Well, why not president?" her teacher replied.
The politicians Martinez saw on the nightly news all seemed to be lawyers, she once told an interviewer, so after getting her degree in criminal justice from the University of Texas-El Paso, she enrolled at the University of Oklahoma's law school, where she became president of her second-year class. In 1986, fresh out of school, she went to work for Doug Driggers, the Democratic district attorney for Doña Ana County in southern New Mexico. He hired her as the only female prosecutor in his office, and Martinez quickly carved out a reputation for handling tough cases involving sexual and child abuse. She was an aggressive prosecutor with an unwavering sense of right and wrong, Driggers recalls, a woman who saw the world in black and white and often won. In one case, she told the same interviewer, a father who had drowned his two-year-old in front of his four-year-old brother testified that he'd only held the boy down for a minute. Martinez kept the court in silence for one long, agonizing minute to make her point. "She could sing to the jury," says Michael Lilley, a criminal defense attorney in Las Cruces.
When voters tossed Driggers out in 1992, his replacement, a local defense attorney named Greg Valdez, fired Martinez after she was asked to testify against him in an internal grievance case. She sued for wrongful termination—in the process, she says, she learned that Valdez had put a note in her personnel file complaining Martinez was a poor dresser—and settled out of court for about $120,000. In 1996, she ran against him on the Republican ticket. Local pols remember her as a skilled campaigner with a knack for pressing the flesh, and she won by 18 points.
As district attorney, Martinez displayed the kind of hard-driving tactics that would come to define her. She was known for demanding harsh penalties, and didn't hesitate to lock up defendants awaiting trial. (In 2012, the county said that Martinez's office was partially responsible for an incident in which a mentally ill man named Stephen Slevin was left in solitary confinement for nearly two years without trial, and later agreed to pay a $15.5 million settlement.)
In 2002, the kind of case that makes celebrities out of DAs landed on Martinez's desk. Five-month-old Brianna Lopez had been raped, bitten, dropped, and abused to death by members of her family in one of the worst child abuse cases in state history. "Baby Brianna" dominated the headlines for months, and Martinez ultimately secured convictions sentencing Lopez's father to prison for 57 years, her uncle for 51, and her mother for 27. Believing that the existing statute wasn't strong enough, Martinez lobbied the state Legislature for three years until it passed a law permitting life sentences for child abuse resulting in death.
People who worked with Martinez or squared off against her in the courtroom praise her conviction and commitment, especially on behalf of the most vulnerable. "But if you ran afoul," says Darren Kugler, a state judge who once worked as a prosecutor under Martinez, "you were pushed off into purgatory or oblivion or Siberia. If you cross a certain line, you're beyond redemption."
It wasn't long before the zealous, popular prosecutor caught the state party's eye. In 2001, McCleskey, the New Mexico GOP's executive director and a canny Republican operative with a record of scorched-earth wins, gathered a group of Republicans to talk about improving the party's Latino outreach. But when Martinez stood up to speak, she blasted Gov. Gary Johnson's push to relax penalties for minor drug infractions. "The way we attract Hispanics is we don't talk about legalizing heroin and cocaine," McCleskey recalls her saying.
McCleskey was smitten. He kept in touch with Martinez, nagging her every election cycle about running for higher office. Martinez didn't bite, even as the Baby Brianna case and standout speeches at campaign rallies for Bush in 2004 and McCain in 2008 elevated her statewide profile. Then, on July 14, 2009, she celebrated her 50th birthday and decided to run for governor. Almost from the start, national Republicans backed her, quietly providing her with support her primary opponents could only have dreamed about, sending her policy briefings and polling data and giving her access to advisers to major party figures like former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
Still, Martinez struggled to stand out. Her fundraising was mediocre, and she lacked the wealth to self-finance like her main rival, a former Marine colonel and state party chairman named Allen Weh.
Weh believed the job was his, according to an email McCleskey sent to campaign staffers, and at one point suggested Martinez was better suited for lieutenant governor. "What a narcissistic grandiose 'tool'!" she replied.
But things began to turn around as major party figures from outside the state put their weight behind Martinez. In May 2010, Texas megadonor Bob Perry and his wife, Doylene, cut the first of several checks that would eventually total $450,000, making them her biggest individual donors by far. And then, on a Sunday morning just two weeks before the primary, Sarah Palin rolled into Albuquerque at the behest of the RGA. As "Start Me Up" pumped out of the hotel ballroom speakers, Palin walked onstage with Martinez and declared to a crowd of 1,300 screaming fans, "You have a winner right here." The endorsement got more press than anything Martinez had said or done in the race to that point. "This event was a grand slam," McCleskey wrote to the campaign that night. "Let's get some rest tonight and then fix bayonets at sunrise."
Martinez easily won the Republican primary in June, and then money began pouring in. Over the summer and fall, according to a copy of the 2010 campaign calendar obtained by Mother Jones, her usual diet of small-town meet and greets made way for fundraisers in Austin, Los Angeles, New York City, and DC. She flew on private jets and met executives at Fortune 500 companies (Intel, UnitedHealth Group, ExxonMobil) and powerful corporate lobbyists.
In the general election, Martinez ran as the clean-government advocate who would do away with everything New Mexicans disliked about her predecessor. Once hugely popular, Bill Richardson had been dogged by grand jury investigations, corruption allegations, rumors of sexual misconduct, and growing disenchantment over his perennial presidential aspirations. Martinez's campaign slogan ("Bold Change") was straight out of the Obama playbook, and it was all the more cutting given that her Democratic opponent, Diane Denish, had spent eight years as Richardson's lieutenant governor.
On policy, Martinez drew on borrowed ideas (her education plan largely came from Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education) and flashy initiatives such as repealing a law allowing undocumented immigrants to get state driver's licenses.
Internal campaign records and interviews with former aides suggest that she didn't dig too deeply into the details of her own proposals: "Aren't we the ONLY state in the US that provides a NM drivers license to illegal aliens?" she asked in a November 24, 2009, email. (At the time, seven other states had similar policies.)
In another email, in August 2009, she asked an aide, "What is podash? Or ashpod? WIPP?" Potash mining is a multibillion-dollar business in New Mexico, and WIPP refers to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, the nuclear waste storage site for the Los Alamos National Laboratory, which has been a topic of statewide controversy for decades.
During an October 2010 campaign conference call, Martinez said she'd met a woman who worked for the state's Commission on the Status of Women, a panel created in 1973 to improve health, pay equity, and safety for women.
"What the hell is that?" she asked.
"I don't know what the fuck they do," replied her deputy campaign manager, Matt Kennicott.
"What the hell does a commission on women's cabinet do all day long?" Martinez asked.
"I think [deputy campaign operations director Matt] Stackpole wants to be the director of that so he can study more women," Kennicott said.
"Well, we have to do what we have to do," McCleskey chimed in, as Martinez burst out laughing. (As governor, she would line-item veto the commission's entire budget.)
Listening to recordings of Martinez talking with her aides is like watching an episode of HBO's Veep, with over-the-top backroom banter full of pique, self-regard, and vindictiveness. As Martinez and her campaign staff rewatched a recent televised debate, Martinez referred to Denish, her opponent, as "that little bitch." After Denish noted that the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce had given her an award, McCleskey snapped, "That's why we're not meeting with those fuckers."
In a September 2009 email mentioning one of Martinez's 2010 primary opponents, a former state representative named Janice Arnold-Jones, McCleskey wrote: "I FUCKING HATE THAT BITCH!" And in yet another debate prep meeting, Kennicott mocked the language skills of Ben Luján, a former state House speaker and a political icon to New Mexico Latinos: "Somebody told me he's absolutely eloquent in Spanish, but his English? He sounds like a retard."
Martinez's crew saw enemies everywhere. A former staffer recalls the campaign on multiple occasions sending the license plate numbers of cars believed to be used by opposition trackers to an investigator in Martinez's DA office who had access to law enforcement databases. In one instance, a campaign aide took a photo of a license plate on a car with an anti-Martinez bumper sticker and emailed it to the investigator. "Cool I will see who it belongs to!!" the investigator replied.
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