Arizona heats up.

• Author: Willey, Keven
• Position: Arizona Republicans fight over speakership - Three of a Kind

Arizona Republicans uncharacteristically indulged in a stubborn flat-out fight over the speakership.

One newspaper account likened them to scorpions in a bottle. Others saw them as mules whose stubborn pursuit of power threatened to topple the institution.

Whatever the analogy, the fourway fight for the helm of the 43rd Arizona House of Representatives was one for the history books.

It took more than 50 secret ballots, two closed caucuses - including a 15-hour marathon that lasted until 3 in the morning - interminable scuffles over proposed rule changes and at least one promised committee chairmanship before the 38-member GOP caucus was able to unite behind a leader.

But unite they did. Finally. And painfully. As a result, when the Arizona Legislature convened on Jan. 13, conservative Representative Don Aldridge, a 14-year legislative veteran from Lake Havasu City, was elected speaker by the full 60-member House. He is the first speaker from outside of Phoenix-based Maricopa County to preside over the House in a decade.

"It was a little contentious for a while there," allowed Aldridge, dripping with understatement, in an interview a couple of weeks after the vote.

Another lawmaker, Representative Laura Knaperek, who backed a losing candidate, was more direct: "This was a nasty race. There were rumors, innuendoes, promises made and promises broken. It takes a while to heal those wounds."

It all started last June when House Speaker Mark Killian, anxious after 14 years in the Legislature to return to the administration of a family-run farming and real estate business, announced that he would not seek re-election in the fall. That opened the gates for wanna-be successors. The field eventually settled to four - Aldridge; Tom Smith and Bob Burns, both of the Phoenix area; and Joe Hart of Flagstaff in northern Arizona.

From the start, the race was difficult to handicap because it didn't run along conventional lines.

It wasn't a conservative-vs.-moderate battle, for example, because all four combatants came from the hard-right end of the GOP caucus.

Gender wasn't an issue. The combatants are all men. Neither was ethnicity. All four are white. Or age. All are in their 50s and 60s.

There wasn't even a schmooze quotient, where sharp tongues compete against smooth talkers. Each of the four - especially Aldridge, Smith and Burns - is known for blunt talk and general irascibility.

In the end, the contest turned more on an unusual combination of seniority, geography, a last-minute rule change and plain old-fashioned tenacity than any overarching policy differences on taxes, school finance or crime.

The campaign was hot and furious.

It got so fierce that one lawmaker confessed that she stopped answering her telephone at home because she was tired of being lobbied about it.

The battle peaked the day after the Nov. 5 election. That's when House Republicans convened at a suburban resort hotel to elect their leaders. The gathering included 11 just-elected GOP lawmakers, some of whom hadn't yet met all their Republican colleagues.

In years past, such meetings have been largely perfunctory. Either no one challenged the generally-understood-to-be-by-rights-speaker or, if there was a challenge, an agreement was reached privately between the two beforehand to spare everybody the discomfort of a flat-out fight.

The closest House Republicans had come to a real contest in recent years was in 1984, and even that paled in comparison. Then-Speaker Frank Kelley sought special legislative...