Reed Karaim is a freelance writer in Tucson, Arizona.

Thanks to her state’s special gift for making headlines of the Can you believe what they did this time? variety, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has been in and out of the national spotlight since she assumed office in 2009—most recently just last week when she vetoed a bill that would have allowed business owners to refuse to serve gays on religious grounds. “I have not heard one example in Arizona where a business owner’s religious liberty has been violated,” she said in a blunt statement dismissing the bill. On gay rights, guns and illegal immigration, Brewer’s decisions have made national news.

Yet in a way, the most emblematic moment of her career remains one in which she said nothing at all. On Sept. 1, 2010, shortly into her opening statement at a gubernatorial debate, Brewer went blank. She lost her train of thought and froze. For 10 seconds, which is a very long time on live television, Brewer stared silently at her desk before laughing awkwardly. She then let another painful second or two pass before finally managing this sentence: “We have did what was right for Arizona.”


For the rest of the country, it was yet another chance to poke fun at a state that, politically, seems to offer a Grand Canyon-sized opportunity for ridicule. (Another recent opportunity came with the news that aging action star Steven Seagal might run for governor, though everyone here knew better than to take it seriously.) Within Arizona, her debate performance was greeted with a mixture of mortification and sympathy–most of us can imagine stage fright. It didn’t hurt her at all in the election, which she won easily. Yet the moment lingers, not just because it was excruciating, but because it captures the odd nature of Brewer’s political identity.

Despite being in the news as much as any governor short of Chris Christie, she remains a strangely blank slate, a tabula rasa on which Arizonans and other Americans have drawn a set of contradictory caricatures. Who is Jan Brewer? Is she the Tea Party heroine, the sun-bleached Sarah Palin of the Desert who signed SB 1070, the “show your papers” anti-illegal immigrant bill, and waved her finger in President Obama’s face on an airport tarmac? Is she the traitor to conservative causes who accepted Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion and battled her Republican legislature to get it implemented? Is she the seemingly overwhelmed, unelected governor of her first term who struggled to articulate basic positions? Or is she the woman who strode to the podium last week and not only slapped down a veto of a bill dear to the religious right, but did it with a brief, blunt statement the New Yorker’s Hendrick Hertzberg called “a damn good speech”? On that, no one can seem to agree.

***

In our polarized political times, no one seems to bedevil the electorate quite like someone who refuses to hew to a clear ideological line. The confusion Brewer produces is best captured by a headline on the liberal political site Wonkette that sardonically referred to last week’s veto as “Brewer being uncrazy again.”

Until that veto, her identity nationally was closely tied to her support of SB 1070 and her confrontation with Obama on the tarmac. But in Arizona, the glow from those moments had long since faded for many Republicans. “With Governor Brewer, the finger in the face of Obama scored a huge perception that here was a legitimate conservative,” says Chris Rossiter, president of the Greater Phoenix Tea Party Patriots. “That image is very powerful. The further you get out of Arizona, the more, if you ask people in the Tea party if she’s a conservative, they will still say yes. But as you get local, they will say, no … Honestly, no.”

That might seem hard to square with much of Brewer’s record, particularly her passionate defense of SB 1070, which included inflammatory and inaccurate claims about Arizonans finding “beheaded” bodies in the desert. She even signed a bill granting the Tea Party’s favorite “Don’t Tread on Me” Gadsden Purchase flag the same protections as the Stars and Stripes in Arizona.

But Brewer disappointed some conservatives in 2011 when she vetoed a bill to allow guns on college campuses. Another veto that same year, of legislation that would have required presidential candidates to submit their birth certificates to get on the ballot, let down the “birther” crowd. And her decision to accept the Medicare expansion, which she announced without warning in her 2013 State of the State Address, truly infuriated much of her party. For some conservatives, that was the last straw.

Not only did she support expansion; she informed the legislature she would veto every bill that came her way until they passed her Medicaid plan and a state budget. When they ignored her orders, Brewer vetoed five bills in a single day. Enough Republican lawmakers eventually joined with Democrats to give Brewer a hard-fought victory. She defended her decision as both a moral and practical choice; her office pointed out that the expansion extended Medicaid to 300,000 low-income Arizonans at no cost to the state.

Nonetheless, many Republicans saw it as a betrayal. Right-wing bloggers began referring to “Obrewercare.” Frank Antenori, a former state Senate Republican whip, described Brewer contemptuously as “George Bush in a dress.” But it was A.J. LaFargo, the Republican head of Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix, who seemed most enraged. “I hate to say this. Jesus had Judas, Republicans have Governor Brewer,” LaFaro said.

***

Brewer offers us little help in understanding her motivations. She has been noticeably reluctant to self-analyze (in a New York Times interview, her two-word response to a question about facing the early death of a son was “very difficult.”), and her staff did not respond to requests for an interview for this article. Still, if you’re looking for reasons why Brewer might find it impossible to ignore a chance to help the less fortunate, you could start with her upbringing. Brewer’s carefully coifed, platinum blonde appearance may bring to mind a certain kind of well-off Southwestern society matron, but the childhood of Janice Kay Drinkwine, as she was named at birth, was anything but easy.

Brewer’s father died when she was 11 from lung disease contracted after exposure to chemicals while working at an army munitions depot in Hawthorne, Nevada. Her mother, who had never worked before, opened a dress shop to support her two children. In her book Scorpions for Breakfast: My Fight Against Special Interests, Liberal Media, and Cynical Politicos to Secure America’s Border, Brewer spends remarkably little time, for a politician, on her own story, but she does say of her mother, “She worked seven days a week, fifteen hours a day. She had no choice.”

Brewer also recalls her father’s death as her first encounter with the federal government. Knowing he was dying, Brewer says, her father desperately sought government disability and survivor benefits. After he died, Brewer’s mother did the same, carefully going over the paperwork at the kitchen table at night. “I remember her going, respectfully but persistently, to the congressman’s local office to plead for help,” Brewer writes. “But other than a small Social Security check for my brother and me until were eighteen, no help ever came.”

Drinkwine went to a community college and got a two-year certificate as a radiologist technician. After marrying, she worked to support her husband, John Brewer, while he got his chiropractic degree. His career and some investments eventually left them financially comfortable, but Brewer’s adult life includes more hardship. One of her three sons, John, died at age 38 of cancer. Another, Ronald, has dealt with mental illness since an adolescent. In 1989, at age 25, he was accused of sexual assault and kidnapping. He was found not guilty by reason of insanity and committed to the Arizona State Hospital, where he has largely been confined since. Brewer has been reluctant to speak about the experience publicly.

“I don’t think it’s too strong to say she has an identification with the less fortunate – an understanding of their circumstances,” says Margaret Kenski, who for 34 years headed Arizona Opinion, a Republican polling firm. But Brewer’s opponents on the left—and there are still plenty—are quick to point out that despite her personal experiences, she supported severe cuts to cash assistance and child care aid for Arizona’s poorest families, along with job training program reductions, during the recession.

Brewer defended the cuts as necessary for a state deeply in the red. Here, once again, she slips easy classification. Brewer also supported a 1 percent increase in the state sales tax to help fund education, despite facing Republican primary opposition when running for her first full term. “The 1 percent sales tax was fairly courageous,” says State Sen. David Bradley, a Tucson Democrat. “The cuts to education would have been so much more drastic without it.”

Others are not so willing to give her credit, largely seeing political opportunism in her biggest decisions. As controversial as it was, SB 1070 was supported by a majority of Arizonans and helped her win election. As for Brewer’s religious rights veto, the Republican establishment, particularly the business community, saw the legislation as a potentially costly embarrassment.

***

Despite more than 20 years in elected office of one kind or another, Brewer was somewhat lightly regarded in the state capital when she became governor. She was Arizona’s secretary of state when then-Gov. Janet Napolitano left to become President Obama’s secretary of homeland security in 2009 . Arizona does not have a lieutenant governor, and Brewer’s position thrust her from relative obscurity into the governor’s office. Bradley, who earlier served in the state House, remembers the initial reaction within his party. “Napolitano left and we were just horrified at the notion of Brewer being governor,” he says. He recalls her as carefully scripted during her initial meetings with lawmakers. “If you pressed her beyond that, she’d get flustered,” he says.

While she will probably never be known for off-the-cuff eloquence, Bradley has seen her gain confidence in office. He has worked with her on mental health and childcare issues and believes her interest and concern in both is genuine. “From our perspective, she’s been kind of a pleasant surprise,” he says, “for the opposite side, not so much.”

Neither of them would like this comparison, but in a way, Brewer resembles Obama in her ability to leave both her natural constituents and her opponents confused and frustrated. Unlike Obama, however, somewhere in the last five years Brewer has become comfortable with the no-holds-barred political culture we live in today, a culture that exists in its purified, sometimes unhinged, essence in Arizona. Part of the mystery of the state to outsiders is how it can support politicians as ideologically diverse as Democrat Napolitano, moderate Republican Sen. John McCain and anything-but-moderate Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

But the state that gave you the gunfight at the OK Corral likes leaders who stride toward the fight—and Brewer seems to have embraced the role of political sheriff in her rough-edged, Western state. Bradley’s most vivid memory of her is at a rally on the capital grounds shortly after she announced her support for Medicaid expansion. She was surrounded by supporters from the health care and business communities, but her own party’s leadership and much of its base were furious. “She knew she was sticking it to people,” Bradley says. “And she seemed to relish it.”

Correction: An earlier version of this article stated that Brewer's poor debate performance occurred on Sept. 1, 2012. It was on Sept. 1, 2010.