“You look much prettier when you smile,” Angie said. “Now wipe your eyes and let’s sing.”
Angie began slowly singing “This Little Light of Mine”—they’d practiced it before—and Gabby joined in. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine, this little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine . . . let it shine, let it shine, let it shine . . .”
When they finished, Gabby was very subdued. “I know it’s frustrating,” Angie said. “But you’re going to get through this.”
“Yes,” Gabby said, but softly.
“Say it like a congresswoman!” Angie instructed.
“YES!” Gabby replied, with a little more enthusiasm.
Watching old footage of herself in therapy was not easy for Gabby. She could certainly see the strides she had made from February to March, and that was encouraging. But at times, she couldn’t help but cry while the video played. Watching herself saying the wrong word then the right word then a word that made no sense at all, she saw clearly that she had a long road ahead. It would take a great many baby steps—and much bigger steps, too—to get back to the woman she had been.
Gabby’s first run for public office was in 2000, when she sought a seat in the Arizona House of Representatives. Before the election, she knocked on as many doors as she could. She spoke to any group that would have her, touting her business experience at El Campo and her volunteer work. (Only thirty years old, she served on the boards of the YMCA, the Tucson Regional Water Council, and a support group for the Arizona Air National Guard.) She explained to people that she was a moderate Democrat who until 1998 had been a registered Republican. Growing up, she was the daughter of a Republican mother and Democrat father. “I learned about bipartisanship at the kitchen table,” she’d say.
Gabby was determined. Her strategy to win the election was to talk to every single person in the district of about 172,000 people. Each day for weeks, she’d put on her white tennis shoes and a pair of shorts, she’d pull her hair back in a ponytail, and she’d walk. And walk. She walked door to door, all day, almost every day, for weeks. She walked from one end of the district to the other, and by election night, she truly felt like she had spoken to every registered voter—or at least she had tried. Maybe they didn’t like her or agree with her positions on every issue. But thousands of them did meet her, and got a firsthand impression, which they’d hold on to when she’d later run for the U.S. House.
The Arizona Daily Star in Tucson endorsed her, writing: “Giffords is the youngest of the four candidates, but she has packed a lot into her years.” Gabby won the election and threw herself into learning the intricacies of state government.
In the spring of 2002, she decided to run for the Arizona state senate, and she was required to collect four hundred valid signatures on her nominating petition. She went walking again. Whenever she had free time, she’d cover herself in sunscreen and take to the streets. On more than one day, she encountered Jehovah’s Witnesses also going door to door. They were a hard act to follow. She had to convince residents that she’d come to talk about issues and ask for support, not to proselytize.
The process was tedious and slow. Some people weren’t home and some closed their doors after ten seconds of conversation. There were a lot of barking dogs. Some remembered her from the last time she came by (or from her old El Campo commercials), and told her they admired her efforts. But if they weren’t registered voters, they couldn’t sign her petition.
Gabby figured out that she was collecting just seven usable signatures per hour of canvassing; she’d have to log about sixty hours in the streets to get the four hundred names she’d need. She wondered if the Jehovah’s Witnesses had a better sign-up ratio.
A highlight for her was coming to the home of four retired nuns. They were Democrats, they knew who she was, and they were happy to sign. She left their front porch feeling giddy. As she later described it, four signatures in one swoop was “the mother lode!”
After three weeks, she got her four hundred signatures and ran on a platform opposing trims to state social service agencies, advocating for better funding for public education, and supporting continued Native American gaming agreements. On the stump, she’d tell constituents about her experiences at El Campo. “More than half of the people applying for jobs at my family tire business were so poorly educated that they couldn’t fill out our application,” she’d say. “We have to find ways to help our public schools do a better job. It’s outrageous that they’re graduating so many young people from high schools who can’t read or write.”
Gabby spoke with passion, and from her own experiences. She won that election easily, too.
Once she joined the thirty-member senate, Gabby immersed herself in the issues, including some that many people didn’t pay attention to. For instance, she introduced a bill to minimize light pollution, asking that government buildings and parking lots in major Arizona cities be required to put shields over outdoor lights. The reason: Arizona is home to a large number of astronomers, and a growing optics industry. Though they’re drawn by the clear desert sky, astronomers are handicapped by the light in inhabited areas. “Darkness,” Gabby liked to say, “is one of our greatest natural resources.”
Opponents of Gabby’s bill called it “frivolous,” but it passed and she continued to advocate for the “dark sky” movement throughout her career. It’s meaningful to me that Gabby believed in the importance of studying the stars even before we met.
Gabby had an easy smile with people, but she was tough, too, and took more than a few unpopular positions. She wanted police to be able to stop motorists for not wearing seat belts. Arizona state law prohibits police from citing drivers for seat-belt infractions unless they have committed another infraction first. Gabby thought seat-belt use would increase if people feared getting ticketed. “We as consumers end up paying for people who do not wear seat belts,” she said. “It costs either in increased insurance premiums or costs taxpayers for emergency services.”
Observing the government at work could be disheartening for Gabby. While legislators should have been diligently crafting a state budget, she couldn’t believe the inane issues they chose to focus on. She complained publicly: “We’re bogged down in debates about whether businesses should allow armed patrons to bring their guns into bars—but only if they don’t order a drink!—or whether people can bring bottled water into baseball games. These are the kinds of debates that give the legislature a bad reputation.”
When the senate was in session in Phoenix, Gabby shared an apartment with another legislator, Linda Lopez. Gabby was a night owl, staying up late reading legislation. She’d Rollerblade around downtown Phoenix. Once, she banged herself up pretty badly—she scraped her knees and arm, and had road burn on the side of her face—but she got back on her skates even before she fully healed. On a lot of fronts, Gabby was undeterred.
Though she was devoted to her job as a senator, she also kept her options open. At one point she decided that she wanted to moonlight by skating for a roller derby team.
I was incredulous when she gave me the news. “The roller derby?” I said.
“It’ll be fun,” she answered. “I want to try it.”
She figured she’d do it part-time for the kicks. She drove Linda and some other friends to a roller derby practice, where they watched young, tough female skaters slamming into each other and body-checking the air right out of each other’s lungs. These roller derby women were tough; they had more tattoos than teeth. Any chance of Gabby actually signing up for this punishment ended as one skater left the rink and, in her drunkenness, vomited into a trash can right in front of Arizona’s youngest female state senator.
Gabby smiled sheepishly at her friends. “I guess maybe I need to reconsider this,” she said.
She still wasn’t sure politics would be her career for life, but others saw she had a gift for it. She began getting noticed in Democratic circles nationally. In the fall of 2003, the Democratic Lead
ership Council selected “100 New Democrats to Watch.” One of those named was Barack Obama, then a state senator in Illinois. He got a few paragraphs in the DLC’s brochure. Gabby got a whole page.
In May 2005, an Arizona Daily Star editorial gave mock awards to politicians and dubbed Gabby Arizona’s “Cheeriest Lawmaker.” It sounded slightly condescending, but the editorial also pointed out: “Giffords wins praise from people on both sides of the aisle for her intelligence, her diligence at research and the way she treats state senator like a real job instead of a title.”
On weekends, Gabby wouldn’t stay in Phoenix. As soon as the legislature recessed, she’d bolt out the door and head south on I-10, home to Tucson. She and I were in the early stages of our relationship then, and we’d do a lot of speaking by phone on those drives. It was romantic. We’d talk about what our future together might look like. We talked about how hard Gabby worked, and how low the pay was in state government. (She was earning about $24,000 as a state senator.) She told me repeatedly that she looked forward to someday earning more money.
I saw that Gabby had a lot of things figured out, but at the same time, she had a lot of figuring out to do. Though I had just entered her life, part of what made her exciting to me was watching her mull all those options of hers. There was so much about her that impressed me—her work ethic, her genuine concern about so many issues, her enthusiasm for a variety of things, and, frankly, her ambition, too.
I was the new boyfriend, yes. But I also had become an admirer of Gabby, both the public servant and the private citizen. I wondered where all of this would take her.
On November 23, 2005, Gabby and I were hiking together in Sedona, Arizona’s Red Rock country. She had left her phone in the car, and when we returned to it after our hike, she had thirty missed calls. At first it was disconcerting. Why were thirty different people trying to get in touch with her?
Turned out, they had all called for the same reason. Word had just gotten out that Jim Kolbe, the eleven-term congressman from Arizona’s 8th District, was not planning to seek reelection in 2006. A very popular moderate, and the only openly gay Republican serving in Congress at the time, Jim was just sixty-three years old. It had been assumed that he’d serve for another decade, maybe longer. His announcement was a great surprise, and all of Gabby’s friends and colleagues who’d left her a voice mail had the same message: Here’s your chance.
Registration in the district was 39 percent Republican, 35 percent Democrat, and 25 percent independent. As a centrist Democrat, people told her, she had the ability to woo just enough independents and Republicans to win the seat.
“What do you think?” Gabby asked me as we sat together in the car. “Should I run?”
“Well, you never expected you’d have this opportunity to run in your home district,” I told her. “You thought you’d have to wait ten or twenty years for Kolbe to retire. You have this opportunity, you should take it.”
“Will you support me?” she asked.
“Of course,” I told her.
“Will you support me to the maximum?” she asked, and I saw a devilish smile forming on her face.
“I’ll support you completely,” I said.
“Good,” she said, “then get out your checkbook. You can donate a maximum of twenty-one hundred dollars for the primary and twenty-one hundred dollars for the general election. That’s forty-two hundred.”
I was still just her boyfriend at the time. We weren’t yet engaged. And as an astronaut, I was living on the salary of a civil servant, so $4,200 was not inconsequential to me. But I saw that if I wanted to show Gabby that I truly loved her, I’d be smart to become the first contributor to her newborn congressional campaign. I obediently took out my checkbook and wrote the check.
Gabby sat in the car, on the phone, for the next three hours, picking the brains and the purses of everyone she knew in political circles. Within a week, just calling the names in her cell-phone address book, she had raised $200,000 from more than four hundred contributors.
She wrestled with the question of whether to leave her job as a state senator to make the run for Congress. If she stayed on just one more month, Gabby would have served five years in office and been entitled to a state pension. But in the end, she decided she couldn’t serve her constituents well if she was busy traveling the campaign trail in a district that stretched nine thousand square miles. She resigned on December 1, which allowed a replacement to be selected before the legislative session began in January. She will never see a penny in pension money, but she knew she’d done the right thing.
Gabby formally announced her candidacy at the landmark Arizona Inn, which was built by Isabella Greenway, Arizona’s first female congresswoman. Greenway won the seat in 1932, and only one other woman in Arizona was elected in all the years since; Karan English served one term, from 1993 to 1995. Launching her “cactus roots campaign,” Gabby hoped to be the third female congresswoman in state history.
Among those there to support her that day was Dorothy Finley, the octogenarian beer magnate who mentored Gabby during her El Campo years. Dorothy was active and powerful in Republican circles, and her endorsement reminded voters that Gabby was working to be a candidate who transcended party labels. (Dorothy frequently invited us to join her at the Mountain Oyster Club. It’s a private facility devoted to supporting Southwestern heritage, including the consumption of bull testicles, which are known as Rocky Mountain oysters. Dorothy loved that place and Gabby loved Dorothy. I went, too, but took no pleasure in eating “cow balls.”)
In the primary, Gabby ran against five candidates, including Patty Weiss, a former TV news anchorwoman with almost 100-percent name recognition. Yes, some voters recognized Gabby from her 10-and 15-second El Campo commericals, but she was considered a long-shot underdog compared to Patty, a well-regarded TV journalist who had anchored newscasts in Tucson for more than three decades. Gabby hustled day and night—meeting voters, raising money, and convening twenty-three policy roundtables with a diverse group of local experts.
Gabby ended up winning the election easily, with 54 percent of the vote, 23 percent higher than Patty, the second-place finisher. The Democrats united behind Gabby very quickly. Patty very generously came over to her headquarters on election night and publicly pinned a “Giffords for Congress” campaign button on her suit.
The general election was far more combative. Gabby’s opponent was Randy Graf, a former state representative. He was a far-right conservative; it was Randy who had introduced that bill seeking to allow Arizonans to carry guns into bars. His platform was centered on his get-tough stance on immigration, and on painting Gabby as soft on the subject.
From the start, Gabby spoke of the need for realistic immigration policies, but it was hard to be heard and easy to be misinterpreted. Her positions were nuanced. She said employers who hire illegal workers should be sanctioned with fines, or should even lose their licenses to do business. But she felt there also needed to be guest-worker programs so Arizona businesses would have access to needed legal, qualified workers. (It is especially hard to find enough Americans willing to work on farms bringing produce out of the fields; Mexican labor is crucial to parts of the Arizona economy.) Gabby also thought that hospitals and law-enforcement agencies in the district that were affected by illegal border-crossers needed to be compensated by the federal government.
She was not in favor of the sort of unconditional amnesty that President Reagan granted in 1986, but felt there should be a reasonable path to citizenship for the millions of illegal immigrants living in the United States. She favored a plan that would require people to register with the federal government, agree to criminal background checks, pay fines and back taxes, learn to speak English, and get in the back of the line. “It’s a path to citizenship,” she’d say, “but it’s not an easy path.”
Gabby’s views on immigration led to her being targeted by ads paid for by the Minuteman PAC, a group seeking stricter immigration policies. They
called her “out of touch.” She responded: “Building a wall across the entire expanse of the border is not going to fix the problem.”
In a red state like Arizona, no politician is easily elected without supporting gun rights, and Gabby did, too. But she wanted to be rational. “I take my cues from law enforcement,” she’d say. “The mentally ill and convicted criminals shouldn’t have access to firearms.”
Gabby stayed on message. When she was criticized, she’d say she understood people’s frustrations. When she was taunted, she’d try to stick to the issues. She was tactful. She resisted getting irritated. As a military man, I was impressed by her discipline.
In campaign literature and at appearances, Gabby made sure she was referred to as Gabrielle Giffords. Her given name made her seem more serious, more mature. And that’s why many in the opposing party relished calling her “Gabby.” They hoped the nickname would make her seem girlish, younger, more frivolous. Voters were reminded that Gabby was the name of a character on TV’s Desperate Housewives. It didn’t sound like the name of a congresswoman.
Some of Gabby’s supporters thought the opposition was using “Gabby” in the same patronizing and sexist way they’d say “sweetie” or “honey.” Gabby didn’t let it get to her. She soldiered on.
Before friendly groups, she’d sometimes joke that her friends called her Gabby because she talked a lot. She’d get a few laughs by saying that. But mostly, she stuck with Gabrielle. A man named Lincoln can go by Abe instead of Abraham, a man named Carter can be Jimmy instead of James, but a woman named Gabrielle thought it best to wait a few more election cycles before she publicly allowed herself her nickname. I believe she was right in that decision.
Over the course of the campaign, I went with Gabby to several dozen appearances. Standing in the back of the room, I was always struck by the ease with which she held on to the audience, and how carefully she listened to people. I marveled at how fresh she could sound, repeating the same lines and answering the same questions. After a while, I could have delivered her entire twenty-minute stump speech. “When your family calls, you go,” she’d say. “That’s what you do. So I put on my boots, I got back in my pickup truck, I drove across the country, and I started changing tires the next day.”
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