Martha McSally flies back into battle for House seat

TUCSON, Ariz. – More than 20 years ago, Martha McSally and two other women were trotted out before TV cameras at the Pentagon and asked about being the first female Air Force pilots picked to fly in combat.

Then just 27, the now-Arizona GOP House hopeful stole the show. Asked if she had grown impatient waiting for the military to reverse its ban on female fighter pilots, the hotshot captain let loose.

{mosads}“I haven’t been sitting around going, ‘Geez, what are they going to do and when. I’m getting sick of it,’ ” McSally tells reporters in a grainy April 1993 video clip preserved in the C-SPAN archives. “No, I’ve been going to work everyday and doing my job as the best T-37 instructor pilot I can be to train our young aviators to go off and fly in those cockpits.”

Today, she’s displaying that same feisty spirit as she seeks to knock off vulnerable Rep. Ron Barber (D-Ariz.) in a rematch of the 2012 race that’s attracted more than $6 million in outside spending.

New and Improved McSally

McSally seems better prepared this time around: She’s now a seasoned candidate, running a more disciplined operation than when she nearly upset Barber in 2012 for the seat once held by his former boss, Gabby Giffords.

The 48-year-old retired Air Force colonel has had more time to organize her ground game and has nearly matched Barber’s fundraising this cycle with help from big-name Republicans like Speaker John Boehner (Ohio) and Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.).

Democrats mock her “makeover,” saying consultants are coaching her on how to dress and what to say.

“A candidate rebranding exercise,” is what Arizona political strategist Rodd McLeod, a Barber adviser, called it. And she’s frustrated reporters, as she’s learned to navigate questions on controversial topics that have tripped her up in past races.

Boehner is heading to the Phoenix area this weekend to raise cash for McSally and other GOP candidates. But in an interview at a Tucson coffee bar, McSally refuses say whether Boehner deserves another term as Speaker: “Let me get elected first. We can talk about that afterwards.” She won’t commit to supporting him? “No, it depends who’s up,” she says. But Boehner has said he’s definitely running. “You know what? I am focused on winning this election first.”

In the past, McSally has expressed support for House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) budget, which Democrats argue would gut Medicare. She’s previously sidestepped questions about last fall’s GOP-led government shutdown. However, she now makes clear she does not back the Ryan budget and that the shutdown was “a really stupid idea,” noting she would have voted to reopen the government if she had been in Congress.

Tea Party Tarring

At an early-voting campaign rally at a Tucson YMCA, Barber, 69, speaks about the sweet smell of creosote bush after the previous night’s hard rain. Then he pounces on McSally’s shifting statements: “She’s a pretty slippery lady,” he says to about 50 seniors.

“She had Tea Party aligned positions in 2012. … I think she is trying to fool the voters because she thinks that people will forget,” Barber tells The Hill in an interview before ducking out a side door and hopping into an idling SUV to avoid a GOP video tracker. “I have no doubt that her voting record in Congress would be 100 percent in line with the Tea Party.”

McSally pushes back on that, saying she doesn’t neatly fit in either the Tea Party or GOP  establishment column. As for Barber’s charges that she’s out of touch with struggling families? “Total B.S.,” she says. Her father died of a heart attack when she was 12. Her mother, in her 40s, was forced to go back to school, then find work to support the family. McSally has three taxpayer-funded degrees, including a master’s degree from Harvard’s Kennedy School.

“He’s trying to scare seniors, scare the middle class, scare women,” McSally says, karate chopping the table three times for emphasis, so that a coffee mug nearly falls off the table. “I get the challenges that middle-class families have right now in this economy.”

Voters in the Tucson-based swing district are equally divided in thirds — Democrats, Republicans and independents — which is why both Barber and McSally have been tacking to the center and painting their opponent as partisan extremists. Polls show a neck-and-neck race.

The mere mention of McSally can inspire vitriolic responses, even from centrists. Phil Tygiel, 67, a Republican who is volunteering with the Barber campaign, has been put off by her constantly casting blame on Obama.

“I’ve been watching her for two years. The woman stands for nothing,” says Tygiel, a physical therapist in town. “If I wanted her to fly a plane for me, you bet I’d hire her to fly my plane, but not to go to Congress.”

“I don’t think she’s proven herself politically,” says Luise Faber, 76, a registered independent and retired banker.  

Having served 22 years in the male-dominated military, McSally is used to dealing with double standards. “People are focused on your looks instead of what comes out of your mouth,” she says. “If you’re strong and you’re a man, you’re a leader. If you’re strong and you’re a women, it’s the B-word.”

“We’re winning over a lot of Democratic feminist women,” adds McSally, In addition to breaking the combat-mission barrier, she became the first woman to command a fighter squadron, while stationed at Tucson’s Davis-Monthan Air Force Base. “They look at what I’ve done in my life, succeeding as a woman in a man’s world, breaking the glass ceiling, taking on the power structure.”

One of those Democrats is Mary K. Klein, 57, a Tucson veterinarian who first met McSally more than a decade ago, when she was treating one of her dogs. Barber is a “really nice man,” Klein says. “I just don’t think he is as effective a legislator as I know Martha will be. I want someone who will make a difference when push comes to shove.”

Barber’s Challenge

Indeed, that’s a common knock on Barber: that he’s a great guy but is just too soft for the job, even though the grandfather of five took two bullets. Everyone in town knows his story: Giffords’s top staffer in Tucson, Barber was severely injured in the 2011 shooting massacre that killed  six people and nearly took the life of his boss, a rising star in the Democratic Party.

At the Lighthouse YMCA, Barber points out his scar where a gunman’s bullet pierced his left cheek, barely missing his carotid artery; another bullet struck him near the groin. He recovered, won the 2012 special election to replace Giffords, then went on that year to narrowly beat McSally by 2,500 votes for a full two-year term.

{mossecondads}Giffords’s gun-control super-PAC has spent $1.5 million on ads attacking McSally  and propping up Barber, but Barber says his name is on the Nov. 4 ballot, not Giffords’s.

“I have never once said I’m gonna run because Gabby supports me,” he says in the interview. “I want people to look at me and say, ‘Does he represent who we are? Is he going to be our voice? Is he going to be independent minded?”

McSally might have found her voice that day at the Pentagon on April 28, 1993. The press conference was the culmination of days of preparation: Military officials conducted background checks on the three women, called their old bosses to make sure they would withstand the pressure and put them through a media training boot camp used for generals.

First, President Clinton’s defense secretary, Les Aspin, announced the change in policy. When Air Force Chief of Staff Merrill McPeak defended the change, McSally, just off camera, crossed her arms and glared at the four-star general. After all, he had repeatedly testified before Congress that he believed women shouldn’t be sent into combat.

Still, the magnitude of that moment wasn’t lost on her. For years, she had refused to give up her dream of becoming a fighter pilot. And the endurance athlete had trained relentlessly so she’d be ready to go if and when the call ever came.

“The core qualities that brought me to be standing on that stage,” McSally says, “are still the core qualities that have brought me 25 days until unseating the most vulnerable member of Congress: Don’t take no for an answer. Speak your mind. Even when people say things are impossible, don’t listen to that. You can make things happen even if people say they can’t.”