Arizona heats up.

Arizona Republicans uncharacteristically indulged in a stubborn flat-out fight over the speakership.

One newspaper account likened them to scorpions in a bottle. Others saw them as mules whose stubborn pursuit of power threatened to topple the institution.

Whatever the analogy, the fourway fight for the helm of the 43rd Arizona House of Representatives was one for the history books.

It took more than 50 secret ballots, two closed caucuses - including a 15-hour marathon that lasted until 3 in the morning - interminable scuffles over proposed rule changes and at least one promised committee chairmanship before the 38-member GOP caucus was able to unite behind a leader.

But unite they did. Finally. And painfully. As a result, when the Arizona Legislature convened on Jan. 13, conservative Representative Don Aldridge, a 14-year legislative veteran from Lake Havasu City, was elected speaker by the full 60-member House. He is the first speaker from outside of Phoenix-based Maricopa County to preside over the House in a decade.

"It was a little contentious for a while there," allowed Aldridge, dripping with understatement, in an interview a couple of weeks after the vote.

Another lawmaker, Representative Laura Knaperek, who backed a losing candidate, was more direct: "This was a nasty race. There were rumors, innuendoes, promises made and promises broken. It takes a while to heal those wounds."

It all started last June when House Speaker Mark Killian, anxious after 14 years in the Legislature to return to the administration of a family-run farming and real estate business, announced that he would not seek re-election in the fall. That opened the gates for wanna-be successors. The field eventually settled to four - Aldridge; Tom Smith and Bob Burns, both of the Phoenix area; and Joe Hart of Flagstaff in northern Arizona.

From the start, the race was difficult to handicap because it didn't run along conventional lines.

It wasn't a conservative-vs.-moderate battle, for example, because all four combatants came from the hard-right end of the GOP caucus.

Gender wasn't an issue. The combatants are all men. Neither was ethnicity. All four are white. Or age. All are in their 50s and 60s.

There wasn't even a schmooze quotient, where sharp tongues compete against smooth talkers. Each of the four - especially Aldridge, Smith and Burns - is known for blunt talk and general irascibility.

In the end, the contest turned more on an unusual combination of seniority, geography, a last-minute rule change and plain old-fashioned tenacity than any overarching policy differences on taxes, school finance or crime.

The campaign was hot and furious.

It got so fierce that one lawmaker confessed that she stopped answering her telephone at home because she was tired of being lobbied about it.

The battle peaked the day after the Nov. 5 election. That's when House Republicans convened at a suburban resort hotel to elect their leaders. The gathering included 11 just-elected GOP lawmakers, some of whom hadn't yet met all their Republican colleagues.

In years past, such meetings have been largely perfunctory. Either no one challenged the generally-understood-to-be-by-rights-speaker or, if there was a challenge, an agreement was reached privately between the two beforehand to spare everybody the discomfort of a flat-out fight.

The closest House Republicans had come to a real contest in recent years was in 1984, and even that paled in comparison. Then-Speaker Frank Kelley sought special legislative favors in exchange for stepping aside after an unprecedented eight years at the House helm.

When word hit the newspapers of Kelley's desire for extra per diem money, afternoon-only committee assignments and favored parking and seating spots, it only enhanced challenger Jamie Sossaman's bid to succeed him. The caucus that elected Sossaman took place congenially over lunch.

Not so this time.

"Like scorpions in a bottle, Republicans in the Arizona House fought for 15 hours over who will lead them," reported The Arizona Republic, the state's largest newspaper, after the first leader-seeking caucus. "They voted 50 times. After eight hours in their hotel conference room, tempers were so frayed that they chased off a mariachi band playing at a nearby party.

"The mariachis moved on. The Republicans didn't.

"By 3 a.m. Thursday, they were stung, battered and weary, but no closer to electing a speaker."

Why the difficulty? Two reasons.

First, a self-imposed rule the caucus had agreed to at the outset of negotiations required the winner to collect 31 votes. This represented a sort of super-super-majority. It was a majority of the 60-member House, rather than the simpler majority of the 38-member caucus. Outgoing Speaker Mark Killian, who chaired the marathon caucus, proposed the 31-vote requirement as a way to protect against a Democratic end run.

Killian worried that without 31 votes, the House's 22 Democrats might pick off enough maverick Republicans come January to elect a coalition candidate of their own.

But Killian soon regretted proposing the rule. Ballot after ballot, nobody came close to 31. After hours of tedious tallies, the caucus voted to lower the bar to 26. It didn't matter. Nobody could get that many votes, either. By this time, it was nearly 3 a.m. Everybody went home.

The second reason for the difficulty was the never-say-die attitude of the combatants.

Gone was the tradition of the vanquished aspirant stepping aside gracefully to spare the institution the rough and tumble of a leadership fight. Instead, each man pledged to carry on, forever, it seemed, if that's what it took to win.

"Everybody knows we have a very diverse caucus," Burns said after the 15-hour tug of war. "I think the exercise was beneficial. We had to go through it - it's just something we had to do."

At one point, Aldridge tried to insist that after each vote the low man step aside. But it didn't happen. Even when additional candidates entered the field in effort to break the deadlock, or one of the other candidates agreed to sit out the next ballot, each candidate's supporters still cast their ballots for their man, making it impossible for Killian, as election administrator, to narrow the field. About the only thing the Republicans could agree on after 15 hours and 50 ballots was to disband to allow members to cool down and to return in a week or two in hopes of casting a successful 51st ballot.

Democrats, of course, wasted little time casting the GOP indecision as GOP ineptitude. House Minority Leader Art Hamilton predicted that Republican bad blood would poison the entire Legislature. "When there's that kind of division inside their caucus, the contention spills over into everybody's lives," Hamilton said. "It will spill into committee, it will spill onto the floor, it will spill all over this place." Democrats re-elected Hamilton and the rest of their leadership team easily.

ANOTHER TRY

When the Republicans reconvened nearly two weeks later they didn't go back to the resort hotel. They met instead in a House hearing room. The first thing they did was change the rules again. This time, they decided a simple majority would be enough. The first candidate to get 20 votes would win. And if no one got 20 votes outright, whichever candidate finished last would bow out - and stay out.

Nobody got 20 votes the first time around. But Smith and Hart tied for third. So the next vote was to break the tie. Smith lost. Another ballot was held with the remaining three. Again, nobody got 20 votes. But Hart was third. So he was out.

Finally, it was a two-man race - Aldridge vs. Burns. Final tally: 23 votes for Aldridge, 15 for Burns. After 54 separate secret ballots, Aldridge, 59, a semi-retired real estate broker and chairman of the House Rules Committee, was declared the winner.

It is the pinnacle of Aldridge's legislative career. In Arizona, the speaker, if he plays his cards right, can be the second most powerful office holder in the state, after the governor. The speaker assigns all committee members and chairmen in the House, decides which committees bills go to for hearing and can withhold bills from floor votes. Also, the speaker is the only legislator empowered to launch impeachment proceedings, a not insignificant fact given the 23-count federal indictment pending against Republican Governor Fife Symington for fraud, attempted extortion and lying under oath.

ALDRIDGE GETS THE VOTES

So how did Aldridge pull it off?

With Hart out, much of the rural support, maybe eight votes, likely went to Aldridge. (Aldridge commutes weekly to Lake Havasu City, nearly 200 miles west of Phoenix, a 3.5 hour drive.)

And Burns, who chairs the Appropriations Committee, may have been hurt by the fact that Brenda Burns (no relation), who is from the same district, had been elected president of the Senate, becoming the first woman to preside over Arizona's upper chamber. Some House members said they were wary of concentrating so much influence in a single Maricopa County district.

With the top job filled, finally, House Republicans moved on to other leadership positions. Ways and Means Committee Chair Lori Daniels edged out Jeff Groscost for majority leader, 20 to 18. And Majority Whip David Eberhart held his job against a challenge from Education Committee Chair Dan Schottel by an identical vote.

The Daniels win was a bit of a surprise. Daniels backed Burns in the speaker's race. Aldridge and Groscost, a leader of a conservative caucus group dubbed the "Gila Monsters" for a bill Groscost once introduced to regulate breeding of the huge lizards, are allies and shared many of the same supporters. Groscost went into the caucus the expected winner against the slightly more moderate Daniels.

But the divisiveness of the speakers' race apparently took a toll on the Aldridge-Groscost alliance. Or maybe with an archconservative in the top job, they felt more comfortable with Daniels in the No. 2 spot. Whatever the reason, Daniels won. But it was downright anticlimactic.

UNANIMOUS SUPPORT

Despite some initial resistance, House Republicans eventually pledged to support Aldridge unanimously come January, effectively blocking a Democratic or coalition-organized run for the post. Aldridge pledged immediately after the vote to build consensus and smooth troubled waters: "We're all going out of here singing Kumbaya."

But many observers expect Aldridge to have a tough time pulling the caucus together partly because of the caucus's cantankerous nature and partly because of Aldridge's cantankerous nature.

The first thing Aldridge did as speaker-elect, for example, was to announce the firing of three top staffers. Two of them weren't entirely unexpected. It is customary for a speaker to bring aboard his own chief of staff and communications officer.

But Aldridge also fired the head of the House's research staff, a veteran bill drafter and the Legislature's top expert on the state's byzantine school-finance laws. This struck many observers - and not a few House members - as injudicious, given the fact that Aldridge had just announced that his top priority for the coming legislative session was reforming school-finance laws.

Worse, from many members' points of view, was the fact that the staffers learned of their dismissal not from Aldridge but via his comments at a news conference.

Several other House staffers have since given notice, including the longtime Ways and Means Committee analyst. This leaves the House without its top education-finance and tax experts as it prepares for the next legislative session.

"It [the loss of key staffers] puts us at a competitive disadvantage with the Senate and the Governor's Office," worries Representative Susan Gerard, who is second only to Aldridge in seniority among House Republicans. "You need good information and you need it quickly in this line of business.

"I know because I just broke in new staff last year [on the Health Committee]," Gerard added. "You have to tell them what you want as well as how to get it.

"It takes longer to get information that way," she noted. "It's not just that we may not get our way as House members, but without good, timely information, we could accidentally really foul things up."

There are other examples of Aldridge's irascibility. Aldridge once fired off a letter to a school board member from a different legislative district who had written a letter about education finance to legislators, the governor and several newspapers.

In a two-page missive, Aldridge wrote: "Sarcasm aside, and with all due respect, it looks like you'd like to be governor and not just a member of a school board. He concluded: "Why don't you run for office and show us all how easy it is to get things done?"

Even Killian, who tried to remain neutral in the battle for his successor, predicted tough sailing for Aldridge in his new role.

"When you're in the business of managing egos, you have to learn what makes everybody tick," observed Killian in a post-election interview.

"Sometimes new leaders go through the school of hard knocks. I expect Don will go through the school of hard knocks a bit."

Of course, the new speaker has supporters. He is quick to defend his friends against the attacks of others, no matter the cause, and those friends tend to remain loyal. Said one: "What you see with Don is what you get."

One newly elected Republican, Karen Johnson, said that Aldridge is much nicer in person than his reputation suggests. She was quoted in one newspaper observing that he "bent over backwards to be nice to people" during the leadership scuffle.

Aldridge defended his staff dismissals as necessary for reorganizing the House. He said he wants to run a leaner, more efficient House (those dismissed were among the highest paid staffers) and even has plans for staggering the staff's work hours so that researchers will be available to members' constituents each day until 7 or 8 p.m.

"There will be a new edict of same-day call-backs by staff," Aldridge said, suggesting that House staff had not been diligent enough on this in the past.

"I'd like to meet with anyone who has a concern, but there are only so many minutes in a day," he said. "Our first priority has been to get the House organized. I think you will find that the staff will be happier six months from now than they are now."

Aldridge contends his reputation for being difficult to work with is a bad rap. He attributes it to his bluntness, which he considers a virtue, and to his commitment to "always tell the truth and to keep my word." He expressed confidence that over time the wounded egos would heal and that he would be able to govern a productive session.

Immediately after his election, Aldridge said his top goals were school-finance reform and property-tax relief for the elderly. Later, Aldridge added boosting economic development efforts in the rural areas and several in-house procedural changes to the list.

School finance is so important to him, Aldridge said, that he's prepared to embrace the imposition of impact fees - generally anathema to the development community from which Aldridge springs. "There has to be some sort of consistent funding source," Aldridge said. "With the growth we're experiencing in this state there has to be impact fees or else the infrastructure will break down."

Aldridge didn't mention cutting income or sales taxes, though he has advocated such cuts in the past. When asked specifically about tax policy, Aldridge said he liked a Senate proposal to reduce vehicle license taxes, but added: "When you get in leadership you have to change your philosophy a little bit. It's fine to cut taxes, but you've got to make it up somewhere else."

POPULATION: 4,217,940

SENATE MEMBERS: 30

Republicans: 18 Democrats: 12

HOUSE MEMBERS: 60

Republicans: 38 Democrats: 22

LEGISLATURE MEETS PART-TIME

Salary: $15,000 Convenes: Jan. 13 Adjourns: April 26

Keven Willey is a political columnist for The Arizona Republic.