Gabrielle Giffords, who was seriously injured in Saturday’s shooting rampage, had begun her third term this week after squeaking out a victory over Tea Party candidate Jesse Kelly in Arizona’s 8th Congressional District. A moderate, Giffords election was made tougher by her support of major initiatives of the Obama Administration, including health care reform, the $1 billion stimulus and the financial regulatory reform bill. Such support cost the jobs of dozens of her fellow moderates. She was the youngest women elected to Congress when she arrived in 2006, one of a large group of Democratic freshman known as the “majority makers,” for helping her party take control of the House from Republicans for the first time in a dozen years.
But Giffords, now 40, wasn’t a strict party loyalist. She won her congressional seat after the retirement of Rep. Jim Kolbe, a Republican. The 8th District has voted for Republican presidential candidates since 2000 and Giffords over the years has voted less and less frequently with her caucus, instead siding with Republicans on some major issues and becoming a member of the fiscally conservative House Blue Dog Coalition.
