Gabrielle Giffords fortress under siege in Ariz.
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By JONATHAN ALLEN | 8/21/10 1:27 PM EDT

TUCSON, Ariz. — Rep. Gabrielle Giffords has built a political fortress in this southwestern swing district that shares a rugged, sparsely populated 114-mile border with Mexico.

The Arizona Democrat's $1.9 million war chest is more than twice of any other House candidate in the state, and her politics are perfectly calibrated for the seat. Giffords talks tough on the pervasive issue of border security — harshly enough to rankle some Hispanic Democrats — and she has used her post to address local needs, from securing a $6.4 million earmark in a recent military construction spending bill to build the Pentagon a special operations parachute-training facility in Marana to bringing House Homeland Security Chairman Bennie Thompson to the district to meet with local ranchers after one of their own was killed in March by what everyone here presumes was a drug smuggler.

But in a tumultuous political year — and one in which incumbency and parochialism have become double-edged swords — Republicans here are convinced none of it will be enough to save Giffords's political skin.

In short, the 8th District — a vast expanse that stretches south and east from Tucson, through Sierra Vista and Tombstone, all the way to a corner border with Mexico and New Mexico — provides an ideal test case to understand the degree to which national political forces might sweep aside even a polished incumbent who has steeled herself for the onslaught by paying close attention to state and local matters.

"She's done everything she needs to do. If she loses, it would be one of those cases where it doesn't matter how much you spent, it doesn't matter what you do," said Rodolfo Espino, a political science professor at Arizona State University.

Or, as Jesse Kelly, an exuberant 29-year-old Marine Corps veteran vying for the GOP nomination, puts it: If Giffords loses, the national electoral outcome will go "big Republican."

Giffords sounded a lot like a Republican in a Wednesday speech to this city's Rotary Club, a crowd of about 175 who found refuge from the 106-degree heat in a Doubletree Hotel ballroom.

"We need more boots on the ground — not 20, 30 or 50 miles north of the border — but directly on the border, so that those ranchers and those property owners that live close to the border are not having daily gun battles going through their ranches and their farmland" like that which are currently occurring, she said. "We also need more forward operating bases. We need more aerial surveillance. We need more resources going to the DEA, ATF, FBI and other federal agents."

In her telling, she's been fighting federal bureaucrats, including Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, to get help for her state's signature problem.

Giffords's Republican opponents, Kelly and former state Sen. Jonathan Paton, say that’s a lot of talk that doesn't actually add up to a secure border, nearly four years after she took office.

"The real Achilles' heel for her is immigration," Paton said in an interview with POLITICO. She's "extremely vulnerable on it."

The main distinction between the two within the immigration debate is on the flagship issue of the state's new crackdown law known as "SB 1070" because of its state Senate bill number.

Paton voted for it before leaving the legislature, and Giffords has said she's against it — a position that appeals to some in the business community but also figures to hurt her with some independents and conservative Democrats.

"Despite her latest dog and pony show, Gabby Giffords has a record of being soft on border security," said Joanna Burgos, a spokeswoman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

Her positioning on immigration issues has caused some consternation in the Hispanic community. She has a new ad calling a national boycott of the state, once supported by neighboring Democratic Rep. Raul Grijalva, "misguided."

Grijalva responded by telling the Arizona Daily Star that "throwing a colleague under the bus is not my idea of responding to a tough race."

Still, Giffords says she plans to keep talking about immigration right through the November election.

"Immigration has been and will continue to be a major campaign issue because of the federal government's inability to do its job, not just recently but over years and decades. This is a critical pressing issue that has Arizonans furious," she told POLITICO. "We spend the majority of our time talking about the southern Arizona border and how it needs to be improved."

For all its political downside, the illegal immigration debate nevertheless provides safe ground for Giffords.

Republicans here concede that she has a top-notch constituent-service operation and attends to local needs. Giffords has used her seat on the Armed Services Committee to funnel money to Fort Huachuca and Davis-Monthan Air Force base, where A-10s land safely after bursting out of the sky and zooming across heavily traversed Golf Links Road at altitudes that seem too low and speeds that appear too fast.

But Republicans say Giffords has voted against the interests of her constituents on the national issues that matter most: the 2008 financial industry bailout, the health care overhaul, the cap-and-trade climate change legislation and the $787 billion stimulus law — all of which she supported.

"She's a tool of Nancy Pelosi," Kelly said. "The truth of the matter is this is not San Francisco. This is a fiscally conservative, border-hawk district."

Paton, the former state legislator, has been emphasizing his own military background — he left Arizona to deploy to Iraq in 2006 — his vote for the state’s immigration law and what his camp says is Kelly's inability to beat a well-ensconced incumbent like Giffords in a general election.

In a recently released television spot, onetime GOP rival Brian Miller places a Paton sign in front of a Miller sign and says, "Now there's only one candidate in the race that can beat Gabrielle Giffords."

While there’s widespread agreement that this is one of the more competitive races in the nation, a new list of National Republican Congressional Committee television advertising targets, first reported by POLITICO, didn’t include Giffords. Though national Republicans deny it, some have viewed it as a tacit sign that Giffords is not yet viewed as low-hanging fruit by the GOP.

"The initial list was merely a down payment to the full playing field that is still unfolding, especially in late primary states like Arizona," Burgos said.

There are reasons to believe a Republican — any Republican — could give Giffords a run for her money. National political forces aside, the unemployment rate in Tucson, which Giffords shares with Grijalva, is nine percent — below the national average but nothing to crow about.

Both of her potential Republican opponents have made the Democrats' handling of the economy a central theme of their campaigns.

Indeed, it's why Paton says he's running in this campaign website blurb: "Over the past year, I’ve watched the country I’ve risked my life for veer down a troubled path. Out-of-control spending. Jobs evaporating. An economy whisking down the drain. Threats of lost benefits for our seniors and higher taxes for the rest of us. Enough is enough."

But the size of Giffords' war chest and campaign skills that Republican opponents say are better than her record suggest it won’t be easy to dislodge her, even in a very favorable year for the GOP.

The bulk of the votes — four out of five — come from Pima County, which is home to this heavily Democratic city. Giffords has won by nearly matching margins of 55 percent to 43 percent in 2008 and 54 percent to 42 percent in 2006, with third-party candidates taking fewer than 10,000 votes each time.

Though Arizona Republican John McCain won the district by about six percentage points over Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election, his status as a favorite son of the state surely exaggerated the GOP performance here in 2008.

Jeff Rogers, chairman of the Pima County Democratic Party, says Giffords has little to worry about.

"I think she's going to fairly crush either one of them," he said. "She's been through this before."

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0810/41337.html