Image via WikipediaIn Giffords’s District, Tension Is Not New - NYTimes.comBy SAM DOLNICK, KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and ADAM NAGOURNEY
This article was reported by Sam Dolnick, Katharine Q. Seelye and Adam Nagourney and written by Mr. Nagourney.
TUCSON — Representative Gabrielle Giffords was distressed when the glass front door of her district office here was shattered by a kick or a pellet gun last March, an act of vandalism that took place hours after she joined Democrats in passing President Obama’s health care bill. “Things have really gotten spun up,” she told a television interviewer the next day.
But tensions have long run high in the Eighth Congressional District of Arizona, a classic swing district that shares a 114-mile border with Mexico. Protesters chained themselves to the desks of Ms. Giffords’s Republican predecessor, Jim Kolbe, 12 years ago. And over the past year, Ms. Giffords struggled in a brutal re-election campaign during which her opponent appeared in a Web advertisement holding an assault weapon. The district has become a caldron of divisions over government spending, immigration, health care and Barack Obama.
Today, the Eighth District stands apart as one of the most emotionally and politically polarized in the nation.
The rampage on Saturday that left six dead and Ms. Giffords gravely wounded may prove to be an isolated act of violence by a mentally disturbed man. The suspect attended at least one of Ms. Giffords’s town meetings before the event Saturday.
Still, the shootings came after a disconcerting run of episodes in this district of mountains and desert, raising temperatures here in a way that some that some of Ms. Giffords’s friends argue fed an atmosphere that might encourage violence.
Several of them pointed back to the smashed door of her district headquarters at 1661 North Swan Street last March as a turning point; a time when a cloud of unease settled over Ms. Giffords and her staff.
She and aides began expressing worry about what they saw as an escalation of threats after a year of brutal town hall meetings over health care. They began to take precautions. “When we did a swing through the district, we began telling the police what we are doing: We let them know where we were going to be,” said Rodd McLeod, her campaign manager.
And Ms. Giffords made no secret at that time of saying she owned a handgun.
“She was extremely concerned about it,” said Thomas Warne, a friend and fund-raiser. “She was concerned about various threats that the office had received: they were general threats on the office itself, on her life.”
There have been no arrests related to the attack on her district office, said Sgt. Diana Lopez of the Tucson Police Department. It came after months in which Ms. Giffords, like other Democrats, found herself being battered at loud town hall meetings on health care. At one of her public meetings on health care, a man with a gun showed up. “There was a sense, even in ’09, that there was a real anger in the district,” Mr. McLeod said.
And in an interview with MSNBC the day after the attack, Ms. Giffords said: “We’ve had hundreds and hundreds of protesters over the last several months. Our office corner has become a place where the Tea Party movement congregates and the rhetoric is incredibly heated, not just the calls but the e-mails, the slurs.”
Last summer, Ms. Giffords found herself challenged by Jesse Kelly, a Republican candidate with Tea Party backing, who assailed Ms. Giffords on health care and immigration. He held a “targeting victory” fund-raiser in which he invited contributors to shoot an M-16 with him. This was playing out against a backdrop of a souring national economy and rising unhappiness with Democrats everywhere.
Mr. Kelly, who won the nomination after defeating a moderate Republican, offered tough-worded attacks on the establishment and Ms. Giffords. “These people who think they are better than us, they look down on us every single day and tell us what kind of health care to buy,” he said at a rally in October. “And if you dare to stand up to the government they call us a mob. We’re about to show them what a mob looks like.”
Despite all the vitriol, advisers to Ms. Giffords concluded in a post-election review of the race that one of the main reasons she won was likely a steady series of positive biographical advertisements she ran over the summer; for the most part she avoided attacking her opponent. “People want their representatives to work together in a bipartisan way to get things done,” she said at one event.
Mr. Kelly received no financial support from the National Republican Congressional Committee. But outside groups focused on the race and invested more than $450,000 in television commercials against Ms. Giffords. The Republican primary did not take place until Aug. 24, giving her several months to command the airwaves in Tucson before her opponent was known.
The $3.4 million that Ms. Giffords raised was more than any other Congressional candidate in Arizona. In the heat of the campaign last fall, Republican officials expressed exasperation at the strength of her candidacy, often referring to Ms. Giffords as one of the smartest and strongest Democratic incumbents in the country.
The race — one of the most dramatic in the country — was so close it took three days to call it.
Ms. Giffords won a third term, but with just 49 percent of the vote, compared with 55 percent last time.
Representative Raúl Grijalva, a Democrat from the neighboring Seventh District, said he was taken aback by the level of animosity in her district.
“We commiserated about the tone of the campaign and talked about how ugly it was and how angry people were,” he said in an interview. “Philosophically, she is more moderate and more centrist than me, and I couldn’t understand that level of ire and that level of hatred against someone who is trying to accommodate and find common ground.”
Given its locale and its demographic mix, the Eighth District long offered a stage for a combustible mix of issues that have torn apart other parts of the country. But the divisions seemed particularly searing here. Because of efforts to more aggressively close California’s border with Mexico, Arizona has seen a surge of illegal immigration that has heightened tensions. “There was no question there were more and more illegal immigrants coming in,” said Mr. Kolbe, who had held her seat. “They were flooding in.”
Ms. Giffords was seeking re-election at a time when Arizona passed a tough law aimed at illegal immigrants, which Ms. Giffords opposed, and as the state faced a threatened boycott from parts of the nation for passing a law that many people saw as intolerant.
“Immigration, that’s the ingredient that makes Arizona unique in a very twisted way,” Mr. Grijalva said.
The 9,057-square-mile district is about 20 percent Hispanic. Given Arizona’s strong brand of conservatism, it is notably centrist, though it leans Republican. Located in the southeastern corner of the state, it includes the Sonoran Desert and old frontier towns like Tombstone, as well as the high-tech corridors of Tucson and more liberal voters around the University of Arizona.
“She represents a very diverse area, from suburban soccer moms and pretty fervent Democrats at one end to the conservative ranchers on the border on the other end,” said State Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat from Phoenix who was born and raised about a mile from the Tucson supermarket where Ms. Giffords was shot.
The Eighth is one of many fast-growing areas of the Southwest, with the population up about 14 percent from 2000 to 2007. Much of the growth comes from people moving here from the Midwest, which partly accounts for its moderation. The district has two military installations and many military-industrial manufacturing companies
John McCain won Ms. Giffords’s district in 2008, but the congresswoman went on to vote in favor of three cornerstones of Mr. Obama’s presidency: the economic stimulus program, the health care legislation and cap and trade legislation, according to David Wasserman, who studies House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.
Her re-election last year was in part a testimony to her personal popularity as well as her ability to present herself as a moderate. In one sign of her refusal to be lumped with liberals in Congress, she voted against Nancy Pelosi to become the Democratic leader in the new Congress. But it also reflected what was, for her, a bit of luck in facing an opponent with such strong ties to the Tea Party, which complicated his effort to attract Democratic independent voters.
Her campaign aides said Ms. Giffords said the political tension was hardly comfortable. “That was a little disorienting for her,” said Michael McNulty, who was her campaign chairman, adding: “there would be a thousand people screaming about it and having at her one after another after another.” Mr. Warne said the situation worsened as the economy deteriorated. “We could feel a lot of things building up and a lot of animosity due to the economy,” he said.
Whether all that had anything to do with what happened here on Saturday is another matter. Randy Graf, a former Republican state legislator who lost to Ms. Giffords in the 2006 Congressional race, said he did not believe the problems that have riven his district played any role in what happened.
“People are trying to rationalize an irrational event and in the process of doing that they’re blaming the blameless,” he said. “The blame is being aimed at everything from the past campaign to the Tea Party when it should rest, by all reports, on the shooter himself.”
Sam Dolnick and Adam Nagourney reported from Tucson, and Katharine Q. Seelye from New York. Jeff Zeleny contributed reporting from New York.
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