Published in the November 2012 issue
One month out from the the primary, twenty points ahead, six-term Republican congressman Jeff Flake of Arizona was taking a breather from his mud-splattered campaign for the U. S. Senate, enjoying a bowl of potluck chili with his extended family in the sweaty shade of the three-story Greek Revival townhouse his great-grandfather built; in it James Madison Flake raised his twenty-four children. The red bricks were fired in a kiln across the street by a man his great-great-grandfather met while serving time in the territorial prison for polygamy; the last of the line to engage in that renounced Mormon practice, William Jordan Flake was the original Flake in Snowflake, Arizona, the founder of the settlement and its namesake, along with the Mormon apostle Erastus Snow.
It was the last weekend of July. As has been the custom since 1879, the residents were celebrating what they now call Snowflake Pioneer Days. Utilitarian yet homey, set at an elevation of fifty-six hundred feet, the town is hunkered in the high desert about four hours northeast of Phoenix, a serpentine drive along the Salt River Canyon and over the Mogollon Rim, through the White Mountains and Show Low, an early settlement named for the poker hand that determined ownership of a nearby ranch.
Of course, Snowflake was first settled by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who eschewed gambling, liquor, tobacco, coffee, and tea. Today, you can buy cigs and alcohol and even rolling papers at the gas station; El Rancho has a bar with a heavy wooden door separating the drinkers from the restaurant. There is no Starbucks; Main Street has but one stoplight. Nearly every resident you meet can proudly trace his or her lineage back to the first stolid pioneers who walked across the desert to get here. Nearly everyone mentions in casual conversation the figure for average annual rainfall: twelve inches. With the faithful return of progeny for the holiday — think Independence Day meets Thanksgiving — the usual census count of fifty-six hundred souls had swollen to nearly twenty thousand by some estimates; with family ranching no longer viable, many kids these days find work elsewhere.
The festivities had commenced Thursday evening in people's homes and all over town. There'd been a stage production of Little Shop of Horrors at Snowflake High School, a tour of historic houses, a crafts festival, and youth and adult dances (with strict age limits and dress codes). The annual parade would feature antique wagons and period clothing, spangled cowgirls on spirited horses, a flatbed hauling a team of squirmy peewee footballers, and along the blacktop route a collection of well-practiced family encampments baking beneath the unforgiving sun. The Flake campaign had its own banner and a white pickup truck loaned by the local dealership. Wearing blue jeans and Justin cowboy boots still dusty from his turn in the family rodeo this morning (in the keg race, which is something like musical chairs on horseback and gets pretty rough), the forty-nine-year-old Flake was accompanied by his tennis-toned wife, Cheryl, a gregarious mother of five, ages twelve through twenty-four. Zigzagging from curb to curb along the four-mile route, the couple shook hands and greeted longtime supporters as staff and family marched past, throwing candy into the crowd.
Though he was ahead by a considerable margin in the polls and in fundraising, Flake's image had taken a pounding these past few months. Not only were issues like the difficult economy, Capitol Hill gridlock, and the Republicans' inability to defeat Obamacare eroding voter confidence; Flake's main opponent in the primary, Wil Cardon, a neighbor and fellow Mormon, was spending a reported $8.7 million of his family's money on the race, a great deal of it on attack ads designed to weaken Flake from the right. As the months had passed, Cardon pounded away, questioning Flake's conservative credentials and his commitment to "immigration reform," trying to align Flake with the cabal of Washington incumbents and even with Barack Obama — in one ad, an image of Flake was Photoshopped into a shot with the president. (On the stump, the crowds' hatred of Obama was visceral; it seemed more personal than political. The local Tea Party faithful, part of the Republican voting bloc, has continually pushed Flake on the issue of Obama's birth certificate; he has refused to become involved, he says.)
In another spot, Cardon accused Flake of using taxpayer funds for personal travel. The ad borrowed a self-taken, bare-chested photo from a Washington Post article Flake wrote in 2009 about his personally funded, mind-clearing survivalist week on a deserted island in the Pacific. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, the Arizona ranch boy took with him little more than a fishing spear, salt and pepper, and a Sharpie. (Feeling lonely, he ended up numbering the shells of 126 hermit crabs that skittered back and forth through his encampment on the island of Jabonwod, fifty miles north of the Marshallese atoll where the U. S. still conducts missile testing. Crab number 12 climbed on his foot and pinched his big toe. Number 44, "my old football number... seemed to race from one end of the camp to the other, only to turn around and race back, as if he were trying to improve on his forty-yard-dash time," Flake wrote. The most frequent visitor was number 74, "who developed an addiction to coconut scraps.")
Somehow overlooked by the Cardon camp as fodder was the potentially damaging information that Flake — who sleeps on an air mattress in his Capitol Hill office during the week and hits the members' gym every morning — has played basketball with Obama at the White House. (He guarded the president staunchly, the story goes.) As was Flake's well-publicized turn as Sir Galahad to wounded representative Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat, during January's State of the Union Address. Each time the Democratic faithful rose to applaud their president, Flake rose also and remained standing — awkwardly with a wooden face — in order to physically support his Arizona colleague and good friend, who had returned to Washington especially for the speech. (At dinner months later in a D. C. restaurant, an aide to Hillary Clinton sent over a gin and tonic as a thank-you. When Flake sent it back with appreciation, the shamefaced aide jumped on his phone and Googled "Flake alcoholism rehab." As he later told Flake, "I thought I was knocking you off the wagon. Then I saw Brigham Young University on Wikipedia and I thought, Phew!")
Here in this election season of gathering extremes, Flake had been left in a defensive posture, forced to spend his time in front of voters explaining away various madcap charges by his opponent instead of running on his hard-won credentials as a libertarian-leaning, pro-immigration-reform, pro-trade, antispending, limited-government Goldwater Republican who has sometimes run afoul of the GOP mainstream in the interest of following his own political compass.
The pressure was such that this career politician — one of the most fiscally conservative of all 535 congressmen, according to the National Taxpayers Union — had felt it necessary, two weeks earlier, to bring together in his Phoenix campaign headquarters both of Arizona's current senators — John McCain and the retiring Jon Kyl, whose seat Flake is seeking — for a joint endorsement. Clearly, after twelve years in Washington, such a move-mountains effort had not been anticipated as he sought to become only the eleventh U. S. senator in Arizona history. Every move seemed critical in a year when four new seats could mean a change in the Senate majority, and with it the balance of power in Washington at a time when votes on key policy issues — such as the possible repeal of Obama's health-care law and changes to the tax code — were looming. (Less than two weeks later, it would be announced that Flake had sought and received an endorsement from Sarah Palin. "He's not afraid to 'go rogue' against his own party and its leadership," the former vice-presidential candidate said.)
Even as he campaigned across Arizona — riple-digit heat and baked highways; a large chunk of the voting populace gone for the summer (28 percent of the primary votes cast will be by early ballot) — Flake's biggest concern wasn't Wil Cardon and his dirty little war. Waiting on deck was the unopposed Democratic candidate, Richard Carmona, a former George W. Bush–era U. S. surgeon general. Harlem-born to Puerto Rican immigrant parents, a decorated military vet and deputy sheriff, Carmona has a tough-guy Nuyorican accent and a history of political independence. Known himself as somewhat of a rogue, Carmona will target Flake as a Washington insider whose conservative fiscal and social policies threaten issues important to women and seniors, such as equal pay and health care. He is hoping to rally disaffected Republicans, independents, veterans, and possibly Latinos, who make up 30 percent of the Arizona population, though only 18 percent of the voters. (Some analysts say Democrats have failed to make any significant effort to register new Latino voters.) Democratic strategists have made Carmona a priority; they believe the party has its best chance in twenty years to claim an Arizona Senate seat, and Carmona, like Flake, has a huge war chest at his disposal. At press time, polls put Flake up by only one point.
One of many contests in a busy political season, Flake versus Carmona — a showdown between a direct descendant of Mormon founding fathers and the son of tan-skinned immigrants — reflects the undertones of the presidential race and our larger struggle as a nation to come to terms with our own diversity.
All of that was put on hold for a while as Flake attended his extended family's traditional Pioneer Days Friday potluck dinner, a midday meal that people in other places might call lunch.
Beside the Flake house is a lush field of green grass; part of it is occupied by an original log cabin trucked down from the homeplace in Utah for display. About two hundred Flakes were fanned out beneath trees and shade tents, on blankets and folding chairs. The mercury hovered near 90; a faint breeze tickled the leaves of a giant spreading apple tree. The sky was a stark and cloudless blue that matched the irises of many of those in attendance, including those of Fern Flake Fairbourn, James Madison Flake's daughter, who grew up in the house. At ninety-two (on September 7), she is the oldest living Flake and not at all shy.
Rising grandly over the settlement, with its gables and carved horse-head crown, its ornately fenced widow's walk, the Flake house is now a museum. While serving a proselytizing mission in England, James Madison Flake had become captivated by the architectural style; his first wife, the mother of his first nine children, died before its completion. His father, the town's namesake, had served a mission of a different sort — ordered by Brigham Young to sell his rich bottomland in Utah and use the proceeds to go forth and create a new settlement in the wilderness. On foot, on horseback, in wagons, William Jordan Flake and his scouting party made a tortured loop through the parched and challenging landscape, down from Utah and clear across Arizona to New Mexico and back to Arizona again. At last, they came upon Silver Creek and its accompanying deep aquifer. In the years since, the life-giving waters have supported seven generations of Flakes and other founding families.
Jeffry Lane Flake — there is no second e in Jeffry — was wearing a nicely pressed blue dress shirt that brought out the blue in his eyes, the corners of which are turned down like his great-great-grandfather's, his father's, Fern Flake Fairbourn's, and many of his ten siblings'. He is the son of Nerita Hock, of Saginaw, Michigan — from whom it is said he gets his facility with words — and Dean Maeser Flake, a former mayor of Snowflake, lay bishop of the church, and member of the state parks board. The couple met at BYU in October 1955 and married in January; up through the present day, short engagements are the practice among a people who believe in saving themselves for marriage. Today, Nerita and Dean have forty-seven grandchildren; the tenth great-grandchild is on the way — Cheryl and Jeff Flake's eldest boy is due to become a father. Nerita bakes bread every week, six loaves at a time in a small and unremarkable oven. She'll slice off a piece and offer it with fresh butter and crab-apple jelly, the fruit from a backyard tree. "It's what home tastes like," Jeff Flake will later say, mocking himself with a little bit of a yokel accent.
Flake grew up about two miles from here, in a room full of bunk beds in a modest, rambling, added-onto house on one piece of the F-Bar Ranch, a modest cattle operation owned by Dean Flake and three of his brothers that stretched over parts of about a hundred square miles of territory. "It didn't feel like we were poor, but we always qualified for free school lunch and those kinds of things," says elder brother Scott Flake, a psychologist for the Snowflake Unified School District — some of the students are from the nearby Navajo Nation. "I guess it was just a function of having so many kids. They made enough money raising cattle to raise big families very efficiently, carefully. But they didn't have enough money to send anybody off to college. If you wanted to go to college, it was encouraged and good luck to you, but you had to figure out how to do it." As Dean Flake and his brothers became too old to ranch, the farm was broken up and sold. Some of the Flake cousins still carry on the tradition, though nobody raises red-coat Beefmaster cattle anymore. Today, everything is the trendy Black Angus. Among Jeff's brothers are an IT engineer, a TV-and-appliance-store sales manager, and an Air Force officer (two tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan). The sisters are all housewife-hyphenates: nurse, bookkeeper, airline gate attendant.
Jeff was the fifth child, "my peaceable boy," says Nerita Flake. "He didn't go looking for trouble, but there was always plenty that came without looking, with two brothers older than he was." Like his uncles before him, and theirs before, Jeff and his brothers often missed school to ride the range or mend fences, brand calves, give pregnancy tests to cows, move irrigation pipes. Even with homework and sports practices, there were mandatory chores every morning and night. "I don't miss the part about milking the cows," Flake says. "But I do miss the part about being dead tired and completely satisfied at night. And showering at night rather than in the morning. I think there's something noble about that." He tells a hilariously gruesome story about being assigned as a young boy the job of making sure the cattle didn't eat too much alfalfa. The sign of overdose: Without warning, a steer would keel over. Flake would grab a long knife given to him for the purpose, jog over to the animal, and forcibly pierce the bloated area — whereupon a geyser of gaseous and smelly masticated alfalfa would spew high into the air. He once cited the story in a House speech decrying bloated federal spending.
Flake's own two-year Mormon mission at age nineteen to South Africa (each family foots the bill for each child; Flake learned Afrikaans) launched his interest in foreign relations and led eventually to a career in politics. He was first elected to the House in 2000 — succeeding another Mormon Republican, Matt Salmon, who had stepped down to honor a self-imposed three-term limit — to represent his largely Mormon district, east of Phoenix.
When Flake got to Washington, he became disillusioned with the way he felt earmarks — which allow lawmakers to insert without scrutiny secure funding for pet projects as parts of larger bills — were hijacking the budget. After speaking out privately on the subject at party meetings, by his second term he went public, mocking earmarks for projects like a teapot museum and a National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. "I ought to nominate some of my colleagues... for the Hall of Fame of Pork," he said during a House debate in 2003. "But I am afraid they would fund it." (That same kind of humor got him in trouble when he was asked about his own original pledge to serve only three terms. "I lied," he told Reason.TV in 2008 during an interview that had turned a little loosey-goosey, as he had mooned the partisan crowd with a facial expression that recalled Alfred E. Neuman's "What, me worry?" and been rewarded with a huge laugh. Cardon's campaign went hard with it on television.)
By 2006, Flake had taken to publicly inviting earmark sponsors to stand during floor debates and explain on the record the need for their pork measures. Two days before the midterm elections that year, he was interviewed on 60 Minutes. Some blamed the Republicans' ensuing loss of majority in part on Flake's impassioned rant against earmarks and D. C. business as usual. As a punishment for his "bad behavior," Flake says, the leadership stripped him of his seat on the Judiciary Committee. "I thought I might be the chairman someday," he has said.
Always popular among his constituents — his rifts with his party seemed to strengthen him at home — Flake survived his disfavor. By the conclusion of the 2010 campaign, the Republican party had adopted a moratorium on earmarks. With his party newly ascendant, the handsome, blondish Flake had become the darling of conservatives and Tea Party supporters.
In the shade of the big old house, the congressman balanced his bowl of chili on a Costco paper plate filled with generic potato chips and Oreo cookies. Later there will be ice cream with Cheryl and his two youngest boys, Tanner and Dallin, at the antique shop in the old Flake store on Main Street. "We love our sweets," Flake had said joyfully outside a soft ice cream stand during a campaign rest stop near Prescott... and again another day at an ice cream shop near Tucson. "We can't do a lot of stuff, but there are no dietary restrictions whatsoever."
Cheryl was sitting next to her husband, wearing a red blouse and balancing a salad on the knee of her capri pants. Wherever they go together, Cheryl takes Jeff's forearm. All around the lawn, among couples of every age, there is also in evidence an extraordinary amount of chaste PDA — touching, hand holding, back patting, heads resting on shoulders. Observant Mormon families who've been "sealed" in a temple ceremony believe they will be together as a couple and family for eternity — as they are at this potluck on the lawn. "When you're expecting to be with someone for that long," Cheryl says, "do you really wanna treat them like crap? It's kinda like 'Okay, let's work on this.' "
Cheryl grew up in Chico, in northern California, the daughter of two music teachers, one of several Mormon families in town. A former cheerleader and a point guard on the Pleasant Valley High School basketball team, she later toured the world with the Young Ambassadors, a song-and-dance troupe from BYU. The couple met on the beach on their very first day of freshman year at the BYU campus on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii. Upon discovering each other at the Utah campus the following year, where both had transferred, they began dating and soon were engaged.
After receiving her associate's degree, Cheryl quit school to work and help pay for Jeff's degrees. He graduated debt-free with a master's in political science. His first job was with a law firm in Washington. (He took some heat during the election for clients it had represented.) For his second job, the couple went to Namibia; Jeff worked for a private foundation that was monitoring the transition to democratic government. Five children later, the two sat shoulder to shoulder against the Flake house, talking in separate directions. A procession of well-wishers paid respects, all of them Flake relations.
"Hang in there — we know you're no liar!"
"Don't raise taxes!"
"Wish you could do something to get rid of Obama!"
"Don't worry — we don't believe a word of those ads!"
And then the candidate was approached by someone he recognized as a distant cousin. This Flake looked a little grizzled, like maybe he'd come straight from doing his chores, or maybe he was from a branch of Flakes who were a little bit down on their luck — times were hard for everyone nowadays, no matter what their last name. Cousin Flake's black cowboy hat was dusty and stained with sweat, his boots were muddy, he needed a shave. Without so much as a handshake or howdy-do, he launched straight in:
"What you gonna do about them wetbacks? Are you for 1070 or against?"
Flake looked up at his cousin thoughtfully, continued chewing the stack of potato chips he'd just popped into his mouth.
In the early years of the century, a number of senators, including McCain, along with President Bush, backed a series of immigration-reform bills, one of which would have given twelve million illegal immigrants the opportunity to become legal. At the time, Flake proffered and supported similar bills, one of which allowed children who'd arrived in the country illegally to petition for citizenship provided they graduated from high school.
After another defeat of the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, first introduced in the U. S. Senate in 2001) — and particularly during the 2008 presidential campaign — McCain, Flake, and others retreated from their positions; the buzzword was amnesty, and
it wasn't going to happen. The new working rhetoric became: Build the fence, beef up law enforcement, secure the border.
At home in Arizona, that attitude didn't cut it. In 2010, wanting to tighten the border and drive out illegals, the state senate passed — and the governor signed — Senate Bill 1070. Upon passage, the bill was contested in several jurisdictions, including the U. S. Supreme Court, which in June enjoined many provisions; the law was rewritten and remains in effect.
Throughout the primary, opponent Cardon had been running ads saying Flake opposed S.B. 1070. He charged that Flake had worked with Obama to gut the bill. He charged that Flake had flip-flopped on his immigration stand. The truth is a little more complicated: Flake believes comprehensive reform is needed; the people he represents aren't so sure. The other day, at a meet-and-greet south of Tucson, homeowners complained of illegals walking through their yards and across their golf course on their way north to the American Dream. Actually, illegals was not the term in use.
Flake finished swallowing his chips, issued his usual stump smile. "What a lot of people forget," he said, "is that the first version of S.B. 1070 would have allowed a cop to just look at a car going by and say, 'Hey, that guy looks illegal. I'm gonna pull him over.' And you know what? I did come out against that. And so did a lot of other people. The governor had already signed the bill, but they went in there and changed it and took the offending provisions out."
The angry cousin looked confused. Flake took a confidential tone, working over well-trod territory. "Look," he said. "You can get to the right of me on immigration, easily. I grew up here on a farm. We employed people — as you know, it wasn't illegal at that point to hire. You saw a lot of seasonal migration back and forth, not the kind of thing now. But I saw what these people went through and why they were here — to work and sustain their family. And I've just never been able to work up hatred toward them. I just can't do it."
Flake's mouth turned down; it appeared as if a fissure had opened along the surface of his chiseled and telegenic chin, exposing a deep reserve of personal anguish.
"We need a tougher border," he said. "We need to build that fence. A lot of Arizonans think that everybody ought to be deported, but I don't think that's so easy. Nor do I think it's right to deny a child — an innocent child who was brought here when they were young."
The angry cousin stared. It didn't even seem like he was listening.
"Well, thanks for stopping by," Flake said, offering his hand upward.
"I wish you all the luck in the world," said the angry Flake, taking his candidate-cousin's hand and shaking it vigorously.
Soon after Snowflake Pioneer Days, Wil Cardon's attack ads began disappearing from the airwaves; on August 28, Flake was handed a resounding victory in the primary, taking nearly 70 percent of the vote in a field of four candidates.
Flake and his wife hosted an election-night party in their spacious house in one of the many gated communities in the Mormon enclave of Mesa, twenty minutes east of Phoenix; Flake's parents and many of his brothers and sisters and extended family were in attendance. At the appointed time, the victor greeted TV viewers with his arm around Cheryl. Taking up the rallying cry of his first new ad, a negative spot to be aired the next morning, Flake pivoted to the issues of the general election. Clearly he was more comfortable taking on the Democrat. At last, sharp lines could be drawn.
"This will be a great race because there are big differences between our philosophies," Flake said. "Richard Carmona is President Obama's handpicked candidate for Arizona, and he shares the president's agenda. And I don't think it is the agenda Arizonans want."
When he said that, I was reminded again of the angry cousin and a subsequent talk we'd had in Snowflake, sitting on the ground in front of an old red barn, behind his parents' house.
I asked him about his angry cousin, the road ahead. Important concrete issues are waiting to be decided in Washington, and yet here he was, playing election: "What you gonna do about them wetbacks?"
"The old question is the same," Flake said. "Are you sent to Washington as a delegate or as a representative? Are you to vote the wishes of your constituents, or do you vote your conscience? I'm decidedly in the latter camp. You run on a platform, you say, 'This is what I stand for,' and then you go back and you vote your conscience. If you vote too far away from what the people think at home, you'll be out after your term. So you can't get that far away, but you don't want a situation where you're wetting your finger every couple of weeks.
"The interesting thing is that in Washington, I'm viewed very differently than I'm portrayed in an election here. When I tell some of my colleagues that I have somebody running to my right, they laugh until they fall on the floor."
The passage is a detailed narrative about Jeff Flake, a Republican congressman from Arizona, during his campaign for the U.S. Senate. It covers his family history, the local culture, and the political challenges he faces, including a primary opponent and the general election.
no_question

the text does not contain any mathematical questions or calculations. it is primarily a descriptive and narrative piece about jeff flake's political campaign and family background.
Given a text passage, determine:
    1. If it contains a mathematical question (including word problems or calculations)
    2. If an answer to that mathematical question is provided in the text

First, describe the content structure you found in 1-2 sentences.

Then provide your analysis in the following format:
TYPE: <one of the following values>
- NO_QUESTION
- SINGLE_QUESTION
- SINGLE_QUESTION_WITH_ANSWER
- MULTIPLE_QUESTIONS
- MULTIPLE_QUESTIONS_WITH_ANSWERS
system
Published in the November 2012 issue
One month out from the the primary, twenty points ahead, six-term Republican congressman Jeff Flake of Arizona was taking a breather from his mud-splattered campaign for the U. S. Senate, enjoying a bowl of potluck chili with his extended family in the sweaty shade of the three-story Greek Revival townhouse his great-grandfather built; in it James Madison Flake raised his twenty-four children. The red bricks were fired in a kiln across the street by a man his great-great-grandfather met while serving time in the territorial prison for polygamy; the last of the line to engage in that renounced Mormon practice, William Jordan Flake was the original Flake in Snowflake, Arizona, the founder of the settlement and its namesake, along with the Mormon apostle Erastus Snow.
It was the last weekend of July. As has been the custom since 1879, the residents were celebrating what they now call Snowflake Pioneer Days. Utilitarian yet homey, set at an elevation of fifty-six hundred feet, the town is hunkered in the high desert about four hours northeast of Phoenix, a serpentine drive along the Salt River Canyon and over the Mogollon Rim, through the White Mountains and Show Low, an early settlement named for the poker hand that determined ownership of a nearby ranch.
Of course, Snowflake was first settled by members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who eschewed gambling, liquor, tobacco, coffee, and tea. Today, you can buy cigs and alcohol and even rolling papers at the gas station; El Rancho has a bar with a heavy wooden door separating the drinkers from the restaurant. There is no Starbucks; Main Street has but one stoplight. Nearly every resident you meet can proudly trace his or her lineage back to the first stolid pioneers who walked across the desert to get here. Nearly everyone mentions in casual conversation the figure for average annual rainfall: twelve inches. With the faithful return of progeny for the holiday — think Independence Day meets Thanksgiving — the usual census count of fifty-six hundred souls had swollen to nearly twenty thousand by some estimates; with family ranching no longer viable, many kids these days find work elsewhere.
The festivities had commenced Thursday evening in people's homes and all over town. There'd been a stage production of Little Shop of Horrors at Snowflake High School, a tour of historic houses, a crafts festival, and youth and adult dances (with strict age limits and dress codes). The annual parade would feature antique wagons and period clothing, spangled cowgirls on spirited horses, a flatbed hauling a team of squirmy peewee footballers, and along the blacktop route a collection of well-practiced family encampments baking beneath the unforgiving sun. The Flake campaign had its own banner and a white pickup truck loaned by the local dealership. Wearing blue jeans and Justin cowboy boots still dusty from his turn in the family rodeo this morning (in the keg race, which is something like musical chairs on horseback and gets pretty rough), the forty-nine-year-old Flake was accompanied by his tennis-toned wife, Cheryl, a gregarious mother of five, ages twelve through twenty-four. Zigzagging from curb to curb along the four-mile route, the couple shook hands and greeted longtime supporters as staff and family marched past, throwing candy into the crowd.
Though he was ahead by a considerable margin in the polls and in fundraising, Flake's image had taken a pounding these past few months. Not only were issues like the difficult economy, Capitol Hill gridlock, and the Republicans' inability to defeat Obamacare eroding voter confidence; Flake's main opponent in the primary, Wil Cardon, a neighbor and fellow Mormon, was spending a reported $8.7 million of his family's money on the race, a great deal of it on attack ads designed to weaken Flake from the right. As the months had passed, Cardon pounded away, questioning Flake's conservative credentials and his commitment to "immigration reform," trying to align Flake with the cabal of Washington incumbents and even with Barack Obama — in one ad, an image of Flake was Photoshopped into a shot with the president. (On the stump, the crowds' hatred of Obama was visceral; it seemed more personal than political. The local Tea Party faithful, part of the Republican voting bloc, has continually pushed Flake on the issue of Obama's birth certificate; he has refused to become involved, he says.)
In another spot, Cardon accused Flake of using taxpayer funds for personal travel. The ad borrowed a self-taken, bare-chested photo from a Washington Post article Flake wrote in 2009 about his personally funded, mind-clearing survivalist week on a deserted island in the Pacific. Fulfilling a lifelong dream, the Arizona ranch boy took with him little more than a fishing spear, salt and pepper, and a Sharpie. (Feeling lonely, he ended up numbering the shells of 126 hermit crabs that skittered back and forth through his encampment on the island of Jabonwod, fifty miles north of the Marshallese atoll where the U. S. still conducts missile testing. Crab number 12 climbed on his foot and pinched his big toe. Number 44, "my old football number... seemed to race from one end of the camp to the other, only to turn around and race back, as if he were trying to improve on his forty-yard-dash time," Flake wrote. The most frequent visitor was number 74, "who developed an addiction to coconut scraps.")
Somehow overlooked by the Cardon camp as fodder was the potentially damaging information that Flake — who sleeps on an air mattress in his Capitol Hill office during the week and hits the members' gym every morning — has played basketball with Obama at the White House. (He guarded the president staunchly, the story goes.) As was Flake's well-publicized turn as Sir Galahad to wounded representative Gabrielle Giffords, a Democrat, during January's State of the Union Address. Each time the Democratic faithful rose to applaud their president, Flake rose also and remained standing — awkwardly with a wooden face — in order to physically support his Arizona colleague and good friend, who had returned to Washington especially for the speech. (At dinner months later in a D. C. restaurant, an aide to Hillary Clinton sent over a gin and tonic as a thank-you. When Flake sent it back with appreciation, the shamefaced aide jumped on his phone and Googled "Flake alcoholism rehab." As he later told Flake, "I thought I was knocking you off the wagon. Then I saw Brigham Young University on Wikipedia and I thought, Phew!")
Here in this election season of gathering extremes, Flake had been left in a defensive posture, forced to spend his time in front of voters explaining away various madcap charges by his opponent instead of running on his hard-won credentials as a libertarian-leaning, pro-immigration-reform, pro-trade, antispending, limited-government Goldwater Republican who has sometimes run afoul of the GOP mainstream in the interest of following his own political compass.
The pressure was such that this career politician — one of the most fiscally conservative of all 535 congressmen, according to the National Taxpayers Union — had felt it necessary, two weeks earlier, to bring together in his Phoenix campaign headquarters both of Arizona's current senators — John McCain and the retiring Jon Kyl, whose seat Flake is seeking — for a joint endorsement. Clearly, after twelve years in Washington, such a move-mountains effort had not been anticipated as he sought to become only the eleventh U. S. senator in Arizona history. Every move seemed critical in a year when four new seats could mean a change in the Senate majority, and with it the balance of power in Washington at a time when votes on key policy issues — such as the possible repeal of Obama's health-care law and changes to the tax code — were looming. (Less than two weeks later, it would be announced that Flake had sought and received an endorsement from Sarah Palin. "He's not afraid to 'go rogue' against his own party and its leadership," the former vice-presidential candidate said.)
Even as he campaigned across Arizona — riple-digit heat and baked highways; a large chunk of the voting populace gone for the summer (28 percent of the primary votes cast will be by early ballot) — Flake's biggest concern wasn't Wil Cardon and his dirty little war. Waiting on deck was the unopposed Democratic candidate, Richard Carmona, a former George W. Bush–era U. S. surgeon general. Harlem-born to Puerto Rican immigrant parents, a decorated military vet and deputy sheriff, Carmona has a tough-guy Nuyorican accent and a history of political independence. Known himself as somewhat of a rogue, Carmona will target Flake as a Washington insider whose conservative fiscal and social policies threaten issues important to women and seniors, such as equal pay and health care. He is hoping to rally disaffected Republicans, independents, veterans, and possibly Latinos, who make up 30 percent of the Arizona population, though only 18 percent of the voters. (Some analysts say Democrats have failed to make any significant effort to register new Latino voters.) Democratic strategists have made Carmona a priority; they believe the party has its best chance in twenty years to claim an Arizona Senate seat, and Carmona, like Flake, has a huge war chest at his disposal. At press time, polls put Flake up by only one point.
One of many contests in a busy political season, Flake versus Carmona — a showdown between a direct descendant of Mormon founding fathers and the son of tan-skinned immigrants — reflects the undertones of the presidential race and our larger struggle as a nation to come to terms with our own diversity.
All of that was put on hold for a while as Flake attended his extended family's traditional Pioneer Days Friday potluck dinner, a midday meal that people in other places might call lunch.
Beside the Flake house is a lush field of green grass; part of it is occupied by an original log cabin trucked down from the homeplace in Utah for display. About two hundred Flakes were fanned out beneath trees and shade tents, on blankets and folding chairs. The mercury hovered near 90; a faint breeze tickled the leaves of a giant spreading apple tree. The sky was a stark and cloudless blue that matched the irises of many of those in attendance, including those of Fern Flake Fairbourn, James Madison Flake's daughter, who grew up in the house. At ninety-two (on September 7), she is the oldest living Flake and not at all shy.
Rising grandly over the settlement, with its gables and carved horse-head crown, its ornately fenced widow's walk, the Flake house is now a museum. While serving a proselytizing mission in England, James Madison Flake had become captivated by the architectural style; his first wife, the mother of his first nine children, died before its completion. His father, the town's namesake, had served a mission of a different sort — ordered by Brigham Young to sell his rich bottomland in Utah and use the proceeds to go forth and create a new settlement in the wilderness. On foot, on horseback, in wagons, William Jordan Flake and his scouting party made a tortured loop through the parched and challenging landscape, down from Utah and clear across Arizona to New Mexico and back to Arizona again. At last, they came upon Silver Creek and its accompanying deep aquifer. In the years since, the life-giving waters have supported seven generations of Flakes and other founding families.
Jeffry Lane Flake — there is no second e in Jeffry — was wearing a nicely pressed blue dress shirt that brought out the blue in his eyes, the corners of which are turned down like his great-great-grandfather's, his father's, Fern Flake Fairbourn's, and many of his ten siblings'. He is the son of Nerita Hock, of Saginaw, Michigan — from whom it is said he gets his facility with words — and Dean Maeser Flake, a former mayor of Snowflake, lay bishop of the church, and member of the state parks board. The couple met at BYU in October 1955 and married in January; up through the present day, short engagements are the practice among a people who believe in saving themselves for marriage. Today, Nerita and Dean have forty-seven grandchildren; the tenth great-grandchild is on the way — Cheryl and Jeff Flake's eldest boy is due to become a father. Nerita bakes bread every week, six loaves at a time in a small and unremarkable oven. She'll slice off a piece and offer it with fresh butter and crab-apple jelly, the fruit from a backyard tree. "It's what home tastes like," Jeff Flake will later say, mocking himself with a little bit of a yokel accent.
Flake grew up about two miles from here, in a room full of bunk beds in a modest, rambling, added-onto house on one piece of the F-Bar Ranch, a modest cattle operation owned by Dean Flake and three of his brothers that stretched over parts of about a hundred square miles of territory. "It didn't feel like we were poor, but we always qualified for free school lunch and those kinds of things," says elder brother Scott Flake, a psychologist for the Snowflake Unified School District — some of the students are from the nearby Navajo Nation. "I guess it was just a function of having so many kids. They made enough money raising cattle to raise big families very efficiently, carefully. But they didn't have enough money to send anybody off to college. If you wanted to go to college, it was encouraged and good luck to you, but you had to figure out how to do it." As Dean Flake and his brothers became too old to ranch, the farm was broken up and sold. Some of the Flake cousins still carry on the tradition, though nobody raises red-coat Beefmaster cattle anymore. Today, everything is the trendy Black Angus. Among Jeff's brothers are an IT engineer, a TV-and-appliance-store sales manager, and an Air Force officer (two tours in Iraq and two in Afghanistan). The sisters are all housewife-hyphenates: nurse, bookkeeper, airline gate attendant.
Jeff was the fifth child, "my peaceable boy," says Nerita Flake. "He didn't go looking for trouble, but there was always plenty that came without looking, with two brothers older than he was." Like his uncles before him, and theirs before, Jeff and his brothers often missed school to ride the range or mend fences, brand calves, give pregnancy tests to cows, move irrigation pipes. Even with homework and sports practices, there were mandatory chores every morning and night. "I don't miss the part about milking the cows," Flake says. "But I do miss the part about being dead tired and completely satisfied at night. And showering at night rather than in the morning. I think there's something noble about that." He tells a hilariously gruesome story about being assigned as a young boy the job of making sure the cattle didn't eat too much alfalfa. The sign of overdose: Without warning, a steer would keel over. Flake would grab a long knife given to him for the purpose, jog over to the animal, and forcibly pierce the bloated area — whereupon a geyser of gaseous and smelly masticated alfalfa would spew high into the air. He once cited the story in a House speech decrying bloated federal spending.
Flake's own two-year Mormon mission at age nineteen to South Africa (each family foots the bill for each child; Flake learned Afrikaans) launched his interest in foreign relations and led eventually to a career in politics. He was first elected to the House in 2000 — succeeding another Mormon Republican, Matt Salmon, who had stepped down to honor a self-imposed three-term limit — to represent his largely Mormon district, east of Phoenix.
When Flake got to Washington, he became disillusioned with the way he felt earmarks — which allow lawmakers to insert without scrutiny secure funding for pet projects as parts of larger bills — were hijacking the budget. After speaking out privately on the subject at party meetings, by his second term he went public, mocking earmarks for projects like a teapot museum and a National Cowgirl Hall of Fame. "I ought to nominate some of my colleagues... for the Hall of Fame of Pork," he said during a House debate in 2003. "But I am afraid they would fund it." (That same kind of humor got him in trouble when he was asked about his own original pledge to serve only three terms. "I lied," he told Reason.TV in 2008 during an interview that had turned a little loosey-goosey, as he had mooned the partisan crowd with a facial expression that recalled Alfred E. Neuman's "What, me worry?" and been rewarded with a huge laugh. Cardon's campaign went hard with it on television.)
By 2006, Flake had taken to publicly inviting earmark sponsors to stand during floor debates and explain on the record the need for their pork measures. Two days before the midterm elections that year, he was interviewed on 60 Minutes. Some blamed the Republicans' ensuing loss of majority in part on Flake's impassioned rant against earmarks and D. C. business as usual. As a punishment for his "bad behavior," Flake says, the leadership stripped him of his seat on the Judiciary Committee. "I thought I might be the chairman someday," he has said.
Always popular among his constituents — his rifts with his party seemed to strengthen him at home — Flake survived his disfavor. By the conclusion of the 2010 campaign, the Republican party had adopted a moratorium on earmarks. With his party newly ascendant, the handsome, blondish Flake had become the darling of conservatives and Tea Party supporters.
In the shade of the big old house, the congressman balanced his bowl of chili on a Costco paper plate filled with generic potato chips and Oreo cookies. Later there will be ice cream with Cheryl and his two youngest boys, Tanner and Dallin, at the antique shop in the old Flake store on Main Street. "We love our sweets," Flake had said joyfully outside a soft ice cream stand during a campaign rest stop near Prescott... and again another day at an ice cream shop near Tucson. "We can't do a lot of stuff, but there are no dietary restrictions whatsoever."
Cheryl was sitting next to her husband, wearing a red blouse and balancing a salad on the knee of her capri pants. Wherever they go together, Cheryl takes Jeff's forearm. All around the lawn, among couples of every age, there is also in evidence an extraordinary amount of chaste PDA — touching, hand holding, back patting, heads resting on shoulders. Observant Mormon families who've been "sealed" in a temple ceremony believe they will be together as a couple and family for eternity — as they are at this potluck on the lawn. "When you're expecting to be with someone for that long," Cheryl says, "do you really wanna treat them like crap? It's kinda like 'Okay, let's work on this.' "
Cheryl grew up in Chico, in northern California, the daughter of two music teachers, one of several Mormon families in town. A former cheerleader and a point guard on the Pleasant Valley High School basketball team, she later toured the world with the Young Ambassadors, a song-and-dance troupe from BYU. The couple met on the beach on their very first day of freshman year at the BYU campus on the north shore of Oahu, Hawaii. Upon discovering each other at the Utah campus the following year, where both had transferred, they began dating and soon were engaged.
After receiving her associate's degree, Cheryl quit school to work and help pay for Jeff's degrees. He graduated debt-free with a master's in political science. His first job was with a law firm in Washington. (He took some heat during the election for clients it had represented.) For his second job, the couple went to Namibia; Jeff worked for a private foundation that was monitoring the transition to democratic government. Five children later, the two sat shoulder to shoulder against the Flake house, talking in separate directions. A procession of well-wishers paid respects, all of them Flake relations.
"Hang in there — we know you're no liar!"
"Don't raise taxes!"
"Wish you could do something to get rid of Obama!"
"Don't worry — we don't believe a word of those ads!"
And then the candidate was approached by someone he recognized as a distant cousin. This Flake looked a little grizzled, like maybe he'd come straight from doing his chores, or maybe he was from a branch of Flakes who were a little bit down on their luck — times were hard for everyone nowadays, no matter what their last name. Cousin Flake's black cowboy hat was dusty and stained with sweat, his boots were muddy, he needed a shave. Without so much as a handshake or howdy-do, he launched straight in:
"What you gonna do about them wetbacks? Are you for 1070 or against?"
Flake looked up at his cousin thoughtfully, continued chewing the stack of potato chips he'd just popped into his mouth.
In the early years of the century, a number of senators, including McCain, along with President Bush, backed a series of immigration-reform bills, one of which would have given twelve million illegal immigrants the opportunity to become legal. At the time, Flake proffered and supported similar bills, one of which allowed children who'd arrived in the country illegally to petition for citizenship provided they graduated from high school.
After another defeat of the DREAM Act (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, first introduced in the U. S. Senate in 2001) — and particularly during the 2008 presidential campaign — McCain, Flake, and others retreated from their positions; the buzzword was amnesty, and
it wasn't going to happen. The new working rhetoric became: Build the fence, beef up law enforcement, secure the border.
At home in Arizona, that attitude didn't cut it. In 2010, wanting to tighten the border and drive out illegals, the state senate passed — and the governor signed — Senate Bill 1070. Upon passage, the bill was contested in several jurisdictions, including the U. S. Supreme Court, which in June enjoined many provisions; the law was rewritten and remains in effect.
Throughout the primary, opponent Cardon had been running ads saying Flake opposed S.B. 1070. He charged that Flake had worked with Obama to gut the bill. He charged that Flake had flip-flopped on his immigration stand. The truth is a little more complicated: Flake believes comprehensive reform is needed; the people he represents aren't so sure. The other day, at a meet-and-greet south of Tucson, homeowners complained of illegals walking through their yards and across their golf course on their way north to the American Dream. Actually, illegals was not the term in use.
Flake finished swallowing his chips, issued his usual stump smile. "What a lot of people forget," he said, "is that the first version of S.B. 1070 would have allowed a cop to just look at a car going by and say, 'Hey, that guy looks illegal. I'm gonna pull him over.' And you know what? I did come out against that. And so did a lot of other people. The governor had already signed the bill, but they went in there and changed it and took the offending provisions out."
The angry cousin looked confused. Flake took a confidential tone, working over well-trod territory. "Look," he said. "You can get to the right of me on immigration, easily. I grew up here on a farm. We employed people — as you know, it wasn't illegal at that point to hire. You saw a lot of seasonal migration back and forth, not the kind of thing now. But I saw what these people went through and why they were here — to work and sustain their family. And I've just never been able to work up hatred toward them. I just can't do it."
Flake's mouth turned down; it appeared as if a fissure had opened along the surface of his chiseled and telegenic chin, exposing a deep reserve of personal anguish.
"We need a tougher border," he said. "We need to build that fence. A lot of Arizonans think that everybody ought to be deported, but I don't think that's so easy. Nor do I think it's right to deny a child — an innocent child who was brought here when they were young."
The angry cousin stared. It didn't even seem like he was listening.
"Well, thanks for stopping by," Flake said, offering his hand upward.
"I wish you all the luck in the world," said the angry Flake, taking his candidate-cousin's hand and shaking it vigorously.
Soon after Snowflake Pioneer Days, Wil Cardon's attack ads began disappearing from the airwaves; on August 28, Flake was handed a resounding victory in the primary, taking nearly 70 percent of the vote in a field of four candidates.
Flake and his wife hosted an election-night party in their spacious house in one of the many gated communities in the Mormon enclave of Mesa, twenty minutes east of Phoenix; Flake's parents and many of his brothers and sisters and extended family were in attendance. At the appointed time, the victor greeted TV viewers with his arm around Cheryl. Taking up the rallying cry of his first new ad, a negative spot to be aired the next morning, Flake pivoted to the issues of the general election. Clearly he was more comfortable taking on the Democrat. At last, sharp lines could be drawn.
"This will be a great race because there are big differences between our philosophies," Flake said. "Richard Carmona is President Obama's handpicked candidate for Arizona, and he shares the president's agenda. And I don't think it is the agenda Arizonans want."
When he said that, I was reminded again of the angry cousin and a subsequent talk we'd had in Snowflake, sitting on the ground in front of an old red barn, behind his parents' house.
I asked him about his angry cousin, the road ahead. Important concrete issues are waiting to be decided in Washington, and yet here he was, playing election: "What you gonna do about them wetbacks?"
"The old question is the same," Flake said. "Are you sent to Washington as a delegate or as a representative? Are you to vote the wishes of your constituents, or do you vote your conscience? I'm decidedly in the latter camp. You run on a platform, you say, 'This is what I stand for,' and then you go back and you vote your conscience. If you vote too far away from what the people think at home, you'll be out after your term. So you can't get that far away, but you don't want a situation where you're wetting your finger every couple of weeks.
"The interesting thing is that in Washington, I'm viewed very differently than I'm portrayed in an election here. When I tell some of my colleagues that I have somebody running to my right, they laugh until they fall on the floor."
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The passage is a detailed narrative about Jeff Flake, a Republican congressman from Arizona, during his campaign for the U.S. Senate. It covers his family history, the local culture, and the political challenges he faces, including a primary opponent and the general election.

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The text does not contain any mathematical questions or calculations. It is primarily a descriptive and narrative piece about Jeff Flake's political campaign and family background.