Everything about Janet Napolitano totally explained
Janet Napolitano (b.
November 29,
1957) is a the current
governor of the
U.S. state of
Arizona, and a member of the
Democratic Party, originally elected in 2002 and re-elected in 2006. She is Arizona's third
female governor, and the first female to win re-election. In November 2005,
Time magazine named her one of the five best governors in the U.S. In February 2006, Napolitano was named by
The White House Project as one of "8 in '08", a group of eight female politicians who could possibly run and/or be elected president in 2008. Her placement on this list and her geographic location have also generated whispers of placement on a vice presidential ticket.
Early life
Napolitano was born in
New York City to Jane Marie Winer and Leonard Michael Napolitano, who was the Dean of the
University of New Mexico School of Medicine. She has partial
Italian heritage on her father's side and was raised a
Methodist in
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and
Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she graduated from
Sandia High School in Albuquerque in 1975 and was voted Most Likely to Succeed. (Her younger brother, Leonard Napolitano, was good friends with
David Addington, who would become legal counsel to and then chief of staff for Vice President
Dick Cheney.) She graduated from
Santa Clara University in
Santa Clara, California, where she won a
Truman Scholarship, and then from the
University of Virginia School of Law (
Juris Doctor). Napolitano is a member of the
Democratic Party. Her early professional career was as a
Phoenix-area
prosecuting attorney and as the
U.S. Attorney for the District of Arizona.
Political career
In 1991, while a partner with the private Phoenix law firm Lewis and Roca LLP, Napolitano served as attorney for
Anita Hill. Anita Hill testified in the U.S. Senate that then U.S. Supreme Court nominee
Clarence Thomas had addressed her inappropriately ten years earlier when she was his subordinate at the federal
EEOC.
In 1993, Napolitano was appointed by
President Bill Clinton as
United States attorney for the District of Arizona. As U.S. attorney, she was involved in the investigation of
Michael Fortier of
Kingman, Arizona, in connection to the
Oklahoma City bombing. She ran for and won the position of state
attorney general in 1998. Her tenure focused on consumer protection issues and improving general law enforcement.
She won the gubernatorial election of 2002 with 46 percent of the vote, succeeding
Republican Jane Dee Hull and defeating her Republican opponent, former congressman
Matt Salmon, who received 45 percent of the vote. Napolitano was the first female US governor to succeed another. Some initially considered Napolitano to be a possible running mate for presidential candidate Sen.
John Kerry in the
2004 U.S. presidential election but Sen.
John Edwards was selected instead.
In November 2006, Napolitano won the gubernatorial election of 2006, defeating the Republican challenger, Len Munsil, by a nearly 2-1 ratio.
She is currently a member of the
Democratic Governors Association Executive Committee. Furthermore, she's also served previously as Chair of the
Western Governors Association, and the
National Governors Association. She served as NGA Chair from 2006 to 2007, and was the first female governor and first governor of Arizona ever to serve in that position.
On January 11, 2008, Napolitano endorsed
Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee for President.
In the 2010 Elections, Napolitano is term-limited, so some say she's considering challenging
John McCain for his U.S. Senate seat or running for the open seat should McCain retire or be elected President in 2008. She has also been seen as a possible
Vice-Presidential candidate for 2008. She signed legislation that offered voluntary full day
kindergarten throughout Arizona.
Napolitano received a low grade from the libertarian
Cato Institute for fiscal spending, citing the fact that her budgets annually increased spending by an average of 6% over the previous year's total.
Time Magazine named Napolitano one of the five best governors in the nation. In another op-ed in the
Arizona Republic Napolitano was critical of sections of the federal proposal debated at that time, saying that, "As a border state governor and a former attorney general and United States attorney, I can already spot issues that make key provisions of the compromise impracticable and ineffective." She was the first governor to call for the US National Guard to be placed at the
U.S.-Mexico border at federal expense and succeed. In July 2007, she signed state legislation designed to penalize employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Previously, when Arizona's voters passed Proposition 200, which wouldn't allow illegal immigrants to collect welfare benefits, Napolitano opposed the measure.
Electoral history
Further Information
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