Conservative Stronghold Increasingly Torn on War

This booming suburb of 40,000 in the shadow of the serrated Santa Catalina Mountains is known for three things, according to Meagan Gillan: wealth, golf and retirees.

Now, Gillan says, add a fourth: residents aghast at the beating President Bush is taking over Iraq.

“People are very angry at the anti-Bush rhetoric,” said Gillan, 52, a 15-year resident who edits the website of the Presidential Prayer Team, a nonpartisan group founded here to pray for the president and his Cabinet.

Oro Valley went for the president by a 62-38 margin in 2004 and is known as a conservative stronghold in a region dominated by Arizona’s most liberal city, Tucson, about 15 miles to the south.

But many residents say they avoid talking about Bush’s most prominent initiative, the Iraq war, in their daily lives. As Bush’s approval rating sinks and calls increase for the U.S. to withdraw, all sides in Oro Valley -- from the president’s ardent admirers to his lukewarm backers to the few lonely Democrats -- wince as they contemplate Iraq.

Though rarely expressed publicly, the feelings are strong -- strong enough to drown out the nuance that had much of Washington abuzz Wednesday, as the president in a speech appeared to loosen his requirements for withdrawal from Iraq.

Gillan does not believe Bush would bow to the increasing clamor for withdrawal. “Not this president,” she said. The idea of pulling out alarms her. “It would make a sham of all our efforts.”

But less than a mile away, another Bush supporter said it might be time to call it quits.

“I don’t think we’re going to win that war,” said Jennifer Jaeckel, a retiree who recently moved from Orange County, as she headed to the local Target. Bush “has done some good there, with the voting.... But, I don’t know, with that culture [the violence] might all just be pretty ingrained.”

Minutes earlier, another retiree, 79-year-old Jane McKinney, a former Kerry-Edwards volunteer and admirer of antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan, said she didn’t trust any apparent shift in Bush’s strategy. “It’s criminal what he’s doing to our soldiers over there,” she said.

A longtime opponent of the war, McKinney says she feels less lonely in her opinions now that her neighbors realize what’s going on in the Middle East. “Now you’re hearing it [opposition to the war] from people who didn’t talk about it before,” she said. “Oro Valley is not a nonreading community.”

The range of opinion is not surprising, even in such a conservative town, said city spokesman Bob Kovitz. “This is a community of 40,000 people and 80,000 different opinions,” he said.

Kovitz credits that to the retired or semiretired status of many residents who have ample time to consume news. Most of the population is older than the city itself. In 1974, a few small ranches in the cactus-studded desert north of Tucson incorporated as Oro Valley. A few years later, the town agreed to incorporate a new retirement community several miles away.

That annexation quickly increased the population, average age and conservative inclinations of the town. Now the space between the ranches on the western edge of town and the retirement community in the northeast has been filled in by stucco homes, golf courses and shopping centers. The population, which has a median income of $61,000 and is 88% white, has grown by a third over the last five years. Young families are among the new residents.

Mars Thierman, a 44-year-old real estate developer and father of two, moved to town several years ago partly because he and his wife believed it was a safe place to raise a family. Although he is a registered Democrat, Thierman almost always votes Republican and backed Bush in 2004, even though he had grown leery of the war.

“In the beginning I thought it was a pretty good idea,” he said as he pushed his 2-year-old daughter, Taylor, on a swing in a park. Now he is concerned that Iraq’s problems are so great it may never be peaceful.

Like many, Thierman is torn -- eager to get troops out of Iraq but wary of the anarchy such a departure could spark. Still, he said, “One way or the other, we’ve got to get out of there.” He added that he believed Bush’s shift came in response to sentiments like his.

It’s those sentiments that worry Danielle Sierra. The 35-year-old mother of three has been a strong backer of the war, and the president, from the start. “If we’re able to help people out, we should,” she said.

Part of Sierra’s support for the war comes from interactions her husband has with Iraqi immigrants at a local hotel, where he runs the banquet services. She said the Iraqis believe life in Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein. “He was just an awful man,” Sierra said.

She’s also proud that her brother-in-law joined the Army and will ship out to Iraq after he completes his training. She compared the shift in public opinion to fair-weather sports fans. “If their team’s not winning, they jump boat,” she said.

Sierra’s not quitting the team. “We started something; we need to finish it,” she said. “People have got to stop thinking just about themselves. We’re the richest country in the world.”