Arizona’s new tough immigration law is roiling the state’s Republican primary for Senate, with incumbent Sen. John McCain defending the legislature for passing it and his challenger, a former congressman, accusing Mr. McCain of an election-year conversion.

Former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, who planned to submit a petition with 11,000 signatures on Monday to get his name on the ballot for the state’s Aug. 24 primary, told The Washington Times’ “America’s Morning News” radio show on Monday that “the momentum is on my side” in the race.

“Arizonans are telling John McCain, ‘Thank you for your service, but it is time to come back home,’” Mr. Hayworth said.

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By Joseph Weber, The Washington Times

Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty still will not say definitively whether he will run as a Republican candidate in the 2012 presidential election, but emphasized in an interview he wants no part of intraparty skirmishes criticizing Sen. John McCain and other potential hopefuls.

“I’ve known John McCain for 20 years,” he said Tuesday on The Washington Times’ “America’s Morning News” radio show. “He has served our country as a person in the military, a prisoner of war. He’s a patriot. He’s fought hard for this country in the Senate. … The bottom line is he has served this nation with incredible valor and courage.”

Such a position distances Mr. Pawlenty, 49, from many of the Republican Party’s most powerful factions – including many “tea party” activists and media personalities such as Fox TV host Glenn Beck and talk-radio personality Rush Limbaugh. Mr. McCain himself faces a strong primary challenge from conservative talk-show host and former Rep. J.D. Hayworth in his bid for a fifth Senate term.

Mr. Pawlenty, who has endorsed Mr. McCain in his re-election bid, also refrained from criticizing another GOP presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, who as Massachusetts governor enacted a state-level health care reform that many Democrats claim resembles the one President Obama has just signed into law.

“We should just focus on what works,” he said. “If you look at the Massachusetts experience, clearly they expanded access [to health care]. But I think even the supporters of the program would acknowledge they didn’t control costs.”

Meanwhile, Mr. Pawlenty, a three-term governor not seeking re-election, said he has his own problems with Mr. Obama’s health care overhaul. He voiced support for an effort by at least 13 other states pondering a lawsuit to challenge the constitutionality of the new law. But he added that only Minnesota Attorney General Lori Swanson can decide whether to join the suit and she has not announced her decision.

“I’m hopeful she’ll join, but I’m not sure,” Mr. Pawlenty said. “We’re going to have to consider other options if she declines.”

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For decades, faith and family have been at the center of the conservative movement. But as the Tea Party infuses conservatism with new energy, its leaders deliberately avoid discussion of issues like gay marriage or abortion.

God, life and family get little if any mention in statements or manifestos. The motto of the Tea Party Patriots, a large coalition of groups, is “fiscal responsibility, limited government, and free markets.” The Independence Caucus questionnaire, which many Tea Party groups use to evaluate candidates, poses 80 questions, most on the proper role of government, tax policy and the federal budgeting process, and virtually none on social issues.

The Contract From America, which is being created Wiki-style by Internet contributors as a manifesto of what “the people” want government to do, also mentions little in the way of social issues, beyond a declaration that parents should be given choice in how to educate their children. By contrast, the document it aims to improve upon — the Contract With America, which Republicans used to market their successful campaign to win a majority in Congress in 1994 — was prefaced with the promise that the party would lead a Congress that “respects the values and shares the faith of the American family.”

Tea Party leaders argue that the country can ill afford the discussion about social issues when it is passing on enormous debts to future generations. But the focus is also strategic: leaders think they can attract independent voters if they stay away from divisive issues.

“We should be creating the biggest tent possible around the economic conservative issue,” said Ryan Hecker, the organizer behind the Contract From America. “I think social issues may matter to particular individuals, but at the end of the day, the movement should be agnostic about it. This is a movement that rose largely because of the Republican Party failing to deliver on being representative of the economic conservative ideology. To include social issues would be beside the point.”

As the Tea Party pushes to change the Republican Party, the purity they demand of candidates may have more to do with economic conservatism than social conservatism. Some Tea Party groups, for instance, have declined to endorse J. D. Hayworth, who has claimed the mantle of a fiscal conservative, in the Republican Senate primary in Arizona. But these groups find his record in Congress no more fiscally responsible than the man he seeks to oust, John McCain.

The Tea Party defines economic conservatism more strictly than most Republicans in Congress would — the Tea Party agrees about the need to do away with earmarks, but the Contract, for example, also includes a proposal to scrap the tax code and replace it with one no longer than 4,543 words (a number chosen to match the length of the Constitution, unamended.) It would limit the growth of federal spending to inflation plus the percentage of population growth and require a two-thirds majority for any tax increase.

Social issues still pack a wallop: a group of Democrats opposed to abortion rights could determine the fate of health care legislation in the House. And Republicans at the Conservative Political Action Conference last month, while celebrating the Tea Party for energizing their movement, spent much of their time talking about banning gay marriage and overturning Roe v. Wade. “God’s in charge,” Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota told a cheering crowd.

Tea Party leaders themselves have found it hard to keep the issues out. The inaugural Tea Party convention, organized by the social networking site Tea Party Nation, featured remarks by fervent opponents of gay marriage and abortion rights, including the Baptist pastor Rick Scarborough And some leaders criticized Sarah Palin — normally a Tea Party favorite — for advocating “divine intervention” to help the country.

Jenny Beth Martin, the leader of the Tea Party Patriots, complained that she spent the days after the convention answering questions about social issues.

“When people ask about them, we say, ‘Go get involved in other organizations that already deal with social issues very well,’ ” she said. “We have to be diligent and stay on message.”

Many Tea Party members do embrace those issues. The subset of Tea Party organizations known as 9/12 groups, founded by Glenn Beck, asks members to embrace seven of nine principles, the second of which is “I believe in God and he is the center of my life.”

Some experts, like Lisa McGirr, a professor of history at Harvard and the author of “Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,” say that the Tea Party uses a kind of code to talk about social values. For instance, when they emphasize a return to the strict meaning of the Constitution, they interpret that as a return to a Christian foundation.

“When they talk about returning to the values of the Founding Fathers,” she said, “they are talking about life as a social issue.”

Tea Party leaders champion states’ rights, holding dear the Tenth Amendment, which restricts the role of the federal government. The Independence Caucus questionnaire, for instance, asks candidates for their views on Wickard v. Filburn, a Supreme Court decision that Tea Party groups say has been used to vastly expand federal powers. (Roe v. Wade does not come up.) So while some may oppose gay marriage or abortion, they want it left up to states to decide. Nor do they support any abridgement of the right to carry guns.

But when the Sam Adams Alliance, a Tea Party-friendly conservative organization in Chicago, surveyed 50 leaders of the movement about the most important direction for the movement, none selected social issues. Most said “budget” or “economy/jobs.”

While social conservative movements grew out of churches, the Tea Party has built its numbers online. Advocacy groups that have helped grow the movement, like Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works, have also emphasized the importance of focusing on economic conservatism.

Raising social issues, the movement’s leaders say, risks fracturing the strength it has built. “Every social issue you bring in, you’re adding planks to your mission,” said Frank Anderson, a founder of the Independence Caucus, based in Utah. “And planks become splinters.”

They also recognize that support for gay marriage has increased, particularly among the young, and so opposing it may alienate supporters.

At a candidate forum sponsored by the Kitchen Table Patriots in suburban Philadelphia in January, nine candidates, mostly first-time politicians seeking office after getting involved in the Tea Party, were asked whether they believed that Roe v. Wade should be repealed. Only one said yes.

“I think that it’s also going to get Democrats over, if you’re not so rigid,” said Anastasia Przybylski, the co-founder of the Patriots. “I have friends where that’s a big turnoff — they’re registered Democrats because of abortion but they’re totally freaking out about the debt.”

Former Arizona Congressman J.D. Hayworth will announce his Republican Senate candidacy  today, but his record as a fiscal conservative has been under assault by incumbent GOP Sen. John McCain for weeks.

In anticipation of Hayworth’s primary challenge from the right, McCain has been portraying Hayworth as one of the big-spending Republicans who, during President George W. Bush’s two terms, largely squandered the party’s reputation for fiscal discipline.

Among other Bush-era priorities, Hayworth supported and McCain opposed the 2003 Medicare prescription-drug

benefit that is estimated to saddle taxpayers with between $8 trillion and $11 trillion in unfunded liabilities over 75 years.

Hayworth, who won six terms in the House before losing his seat to Democrat Harry Mitchell in 2006, counters that McCain is the real profligate spender.

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PHOENIX — J. D. Hayworth is a large man, and to compensate for his indulgences, he hits the elliptical trainer every morning at 4, zipping along to an incongruous soundtrack of Elvis Costello, Frank Sinatra and old advertising jingles.

Until recently, he would then repair to a local radio station, where he would spend the better part of the day denouncing, in no particular order, illegal immigrants, all things Barack Obama, those who are insufficiently patriotic and, his favorite mark, one John McCain, the senior senator from Arizona.

Now, Mr. Hayworth, a former Republican congressman, is preparing to expand his political appetite for Mr. McCain by formally announcing next week what everyone in this state has known for months: his challenge to the senator in the Republican primary in August.

Mr. Hayworth hopes that by standing at the intersection of opportunity and timing, he can lure enough Tea Party sympathizers fresh off their convention in Nashville, seducible independent voters (Arizona has an open primary) and conservative Republican grass-roots activists, who have long been disenchanted with Mr. McCain.

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