Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [56]
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 Leadership 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