Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [94]
I thanked her. I thanked all of them. The next day, the doctors made their incision above Gabby’s eyebrow and removed a piece of her skull and several bone fragments. Using titanium mesh, screws, and the pieces of bone, they rebuilt the top of her eye socket on a table in the operating room. Then they lifted up the right frontal lobe of her brain, which had been pushing into the orbit, and reinstalled this thing that looked like it was built from a kid’s erector set. The surgery couldn’t have gone better.
While Gabby was in a coma in those early days, tens of millions of people who’d never heard of her before were quickly becoming familiar with her. More familiar than she could have imagined. Video clips of her in Congress played all over television. The highlights of her bio and the particulars of her politics were discussed by pundits as if they knew her. And though she had always preferred to be known as Gabrielle in public, within hours of the shooting she had become “Gabby” to the world. It was President Obama who ushered in that instantaneous transition when he gave a three-minute televised statement on the afternoon of January 8.
He started off by referring to her as Gabrielle Giffords. He said she was fighting for her life and he talked soberly about the other victims. Then he got more personal. “Gabby Giffords was a friend of mine,” he said. “It’s not surprising that today Gabby was doing what she always does—listening to the hopes and concerns of her neighbors. That is the essence of what our democracy is all about. That is why this is more than a tragedy for those involved. It is a tragedy for Arizona and a tragedy for our entire country.”
Once the president said “Gabby,” the media picked up on it, and it spread from there. People developed affection for Gabby and her nickname. Maybe it helped make her seem more like a regular person. She wasn’t some stuffy congresswoman named Gabrielle. She was just Gabby, eager to meet her neighbors, and now struggling to stay alive.
Gabby admired the president, but she wasn’t even sure he knew who she was until late 2010 when she came to the White House for a meeting and he said, “I like your new haircut!” She had, indeed, gotten her hair cut that week. His comment made her day because she didn’t really like the new hairstyle.
She hadn’t backed Obama right away when he ran for president in 2008. During the Democratic primaries, Gabby was torn. As a young female politician, she found that Hillary Clinton’s historic candidacy spoke to her. (Gabby has always encouraged women to run for office, believing that if more women serve, compromise on issues will come more easily.) But during that primary season, she was also drawn to Obama. Knowing she needed to be careful politically, she remained neutral for months.
One day in the spring of 2008, Gabby and I were driving somewhere and the phone rang. It was Senator Clinton, hoping to win Gabby’s public support, and her vote as a so-called superdelegate at the upcoming Democratic convention. I heard only Gabby’s side of the conversation, but she was very complimentary, telling Clinton how much she respected her. Senator Clinton never came out and directly asked for her vote. She ended the conversation by asking Gabby, “Would it be OK if I called you back sometime?”
“Of course,” Gabby said.
When Gabby got off the phone, I asked her what she was going to do. Would she endorse Hillary? “For now, I’ll just wait until she calls me back,” Gabby said. She knew how to buy time. She believed that it was sometimes best to defer a hard decision. You might make a different choice if you wait.
In the case of Clinton versus Obama, she held off until the very end, when Obama’s delegate count proved insurmountable. She was part of that large last wave of Democrats who endorsed him.
Her political instincts were always sharp. Her staffers likened her to a chess player, always thinking three or five moves ahead. She combined strategic thinking with