I met State House of Representatives Minority Leader, David Lujan on November 19 2009. He was the guest speaker at a Democratic event.

He formed an exploratory commitee to "test the waters" for a possible run to be our attorney general. Our present AG hopes to run for the governor's office.

Arizona is in hopeless impass as far as the budget. With a Republican governor and both houses heavily dominated by Republicans (for decades), the democrats have very little input. Our Democrat governor went on to a cabinet post and we miss her. But even with her, the democrats lacked enough influence to keep Republicans in check.

I will focus on what Mr. Lujan had to say about our economy and unemployment figures, which place Arizona towards the bottom of stats.

I learned from Mr. Lujan and previously from another would-be candidate for office, that the Stimulus money is not used efficiently in Arizona in order to create jobs and to boost the economy. The biggest problem is that many state agencies did not prepare plans to use the money by "hitting the ground running".  Many still have no projects ready to use the money. We are way behind everyone. But guess what? Most everything is run by Republicans around here. And they drag their feet at every step. Why? My opinion is that they try to sabotage Obama's plans. They hope he and the Democrats fall out of graces with voters.

We, Democrats of Arizona are hoping (and working) to make this a Blue state in 2010, like Colorado did a few years back.

For now though we are only to blame indirectly for the problems of this state. We just did not have enough elected officials here. This is changing rapidly.

As for the poor economy and unemployment situation the blame should rest entirely with the Republican-dominated legislature and the Republican governor and various agencies run by Republicans.

I thank Mr. Lujan for explaining these problems and his insight as to how to correct them. I hope he will run for the office and win.