When Democratic Politicians Commit Unforced Errors

Imagine you are an Arizona Democrat. You have finally won office in the state. The state is now decidedly purple and could move more toward blue in coming years. What are your priorities going to be? How about the single thing that would most needlessly alienate the state’s enormous Latino population?

Milagros Cruz was down to her last $75, and sleeping in a car, when she heard her mother’s voice guiding her in a dream: My girl, make tamales.

Arizona did not make it easy. Though the state promotes itself as a low-tax, low-regulation haven for private enterprise, it does not allow the sale of perishable foods made at home. So for years, a thriving economy of working-class, mostly Latina home cooks has operated underground, selling tacos, tres leches cakes and chile-dusted corn illegally from living rooms and outside laundromats and soccer games.

Ms. Cruz, 41, sells her pillowy green-chile and pork tamales near a Phoenix auto-parts store, and worries about getting cited under a state law that punishes home cooks who break the rules with a $500 fine and six months in jail. She said she would gladly operate legally if she could, but the state offered no way for her to do so.

This month, Republicans who control the state’s fractious Legislature came together with Democrats in a moment of unusual bipartisan accord to try to change all that. They passed a bill that would let Arizona’s home cooks register with the state to legally sell perishable foods like salsas and tamales.

But Katie Hobbs, the state’s new Democratic governor, vetoed the measure last week, citing concerns about the potential for food-borne illnesses, as well as rats and insects in home kitchens.

Her veto set off a ferocious culinary and cultural backlash from the Capitol to kitchens across Arizona, offering a political lesson for the new governor: Do not mess with the tamale makers.

“I respect our governor — I voted for our governor — but this veto, I do not agree with,” said Imelda Hartley, who started her culinary career making tamales from home and now runs her Happy Tamales business in a commercial kitchen. “It’s hurting our Latino community,” Ms. Hartley said of the veto.

How far is Hobbs’ head up her ass here? This is like a parody of Democratic governance. Maybe she can push a bill banning dogs with their head out of the window of a car next.

We can debate the merits of a food safety bill like this. But the problem is that you have to debate the merits within the context of what people want. Is this something that will appeal to the populace or not. Moreover, this is directly antithetical to a party that is supposed to support the working class, where your state’s working people have a long tradition of making money through food production.

Let me put it a different way. I can’t be too specific here, but as you probably know, I am deeply involved with my faculty union. We had a situation this year where the rules around how people are appointed to positions say one thing but the faculty and the administration in a given college both agreed that this should be ignored in this case. That made a lot of people uncomfortable. I made the point that the last thing you want the union to do is to get in the way of the demands of the workers. There may be a risk to making exceptions to rules, but the risk is lesser than becoming an institution that thwarts the workers’ agenda rather than facilitates it. And that is what Katie Hobbs is doing here. It is a very stupid move.