CHANCE TO RECALL ARPAIO SQUANDERED

Launched within weeks of the elections last fall, the attempted recall of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio was not merely doomed from the start, it was so obviously doomed that one had to presume the activists leading the recall had some other notion of “victory” in mind.

Perhaps they simply wished to keep a national spotlight on the sheriff and concluded the best way to achieve that goal was through a starcrossed attempt at recall.

If so, there surely were better ways. The Arpaio recall quickly became a self-evident case of political over-reach, effectively confirming the legend of the sheriff’s invulnerability. They can try, they have tried, everything to defeat him, and yet ...

Neither recall activist Randy Parraz nor the group promoting the cause, Respect Arizona, would reveal how close they came to the 335,000 valid signatures necessary to force a recall election.

But they would have had a better chance of reaching the goal had they demonstrated a bit of patience.

A recall election requires an immediate justification. It can’t be launched simply because you passionately dislike an elected official.

The recent ruling by U.S. District Judge Murray Snow that Arpaio’s deputies racially profiled drivers stopped during the sheriff’s preposterous “crime suppression sweeps” would have provided just such a justification.

Timing is everything in politics, and Parraz et al wasted theirs — to say nothing of the goodwill and scarce dollars of would-be supporters — in this quixotic pursuit of the sheriff.