In a special Arizona election that garnered widespread national interest
for its symbolic significance and potential impact on the presidential
race, a 66-year-old Democrat recovering from gunshot wounds defeated a
30-year-old Tea Party Republican and former Marine who had served in
Iraq.
Clenching the hand of his grinning former boss,
Gabby Giffords, at a Tucson Marriott Hotel victory party, Ron Barber
celebrated his defeat of Jesse Kelly in a special election for
Giffords’s congressional seat. “This was never Gabby’s seat. It’s not my
seat. It’s your seat. This seat belongs to the people of southern
Arizona,” Barber said in his victory speech in Tucson.
Giffords vacated her House seat in January after struggling for a year to recover from a gunshot wound to the head, sustained in a massacre
in front of a Tucson-area Safeway store in January 2011. Six people
died in the shooting spree, allegedly perpetrated by a mentally
disturbed Tucson man. Ron Barber,
who now walks with a cane, was among the 13 people who were injured but
survived the rampage. (Giffords cited her ongoing recovery as her
reason for resigning her seat.)
