In January 2011, I visited Ron Barber in his midtown home to interview him about the shooting that had nearly taken his life 10 days before.
What a topsy-turvy time it’s been since then. His then-boss, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, stepped down from the House in January 2012, and Barber, a Democrat, won a special election to replace her in June that year. Then he narrowly defeated Republican Martha McSally in the general election of November 2012.
This year, Barber, a Democrat, lost to McSally by just 167 votes, or about 0.08 percent of the vote.
On Monday, I returned to the home where a relaxed-looking Barber reflected on his 2½ years in Congress and that incredibly narrow loss. Typical of his family, grandkids and the dog made spontaneous entrances as he explained, among other things, how seductive Washington, D.C., can be for members of Congress.
“There’s a lot of puffery that goes on in D.C. around members, a lot of people building you up,” Barber said. “I remember the first time this happened I walked into a room full of congressional staffers. All these young people stood up, looked at me and said ‘Congressman.’ I looked around to see who they were referring to.”
“That’s part of the bubble of D.C. People who are members are treated in a sort of sycophantic way, I think, by people who work on the Hill and people who come to us lobbying for things. I just don’t think it’s right. I think what we need to have more of in Congress is what I call citizen legislators. People who go there to work but don’t get enamored and get built up and somehow make a fortune out of being a member of Congress. It’s just wrong to me.”
Q: How is that different from your own experience when you got there intending to serve for just a few months and then ran again?
A: You get inside the House, the chamber, your office, and there’s a lot of people coming around, saying what a great person you are, and how much they appreciate what you’re doing. A lot of it’s well-intended, but it really can give you an ego boost that is potentially very dangerous. Hubris can set in, I think, pretty quickly.
What I had to try to do was keep my feet on the ground, come home as often as I could, practically every weekend, stay in touch with my family as best I could, stay in touch with the voters who sent me there. And surround myself, as I did, with people who were not just going to be sycophants, who are going to be willing to say, “you shouldn’t do this.”
Q: You tried to cross the aisle and vote with Republicans when possible. Could you have got more Democrats out to vote and possibly won had you voted differently?
A: At the end of the day, I don’t think it really made a difference. When you look at the turnout in my district and virtually every district, it was even lower than we expected. Going into the campaign looking at some national data based upon history of mid-term elections, we expected to lose 25 percent of the electorate that voted in 2012. As it turned out it was even lower.
We set our strategy around the number of 240,000 voters; 219,000 voters showed up. So 21,000 voters didn’t show that we expected even with a reduced turnout based upon the midterm history. The turnout affected people across the country. Some of my colleagues who were incumbents lost by huge margins as a result of turnout problems.
In some ways we held our own here. Despite the low turnout, we came within just a few votes of winning.
Q: Can you tell me about some things that might have surprised you or changed you about arriving in Congress?
A: The first thing I would say is because Congress has been essentially a dysfunctional body for the last two or three years the American public rightfully is upset with the fact that things are not getting done. That said, there are a lot of people on both sides of the aisle in the House who really want to get things done.
The other part of it that I was not happy with, and this is just a handful of members, but people who basically use vitriol and harsh rhetoric to attack the other side. It’s not my way and I never felt that was the right thing to do. It just doesn’t have a civility attached to it which I believe strongly in. It doesn’t have a dignity of the House that I think membership requires.
Q: Was it surprising to you how much work it was or how much time money-raising took?
A: It was. That was something I had no real sense of. Obviously when Gabby was in office or was running, I was aware that she spent time raising money. But I had no idea until I had to do it myself how much time it requires.
That was another area I have a problem with. Campaign finance laws have been broken open so wide that basically any amount of money can be spent, a lot of times anonymously. I think the fact that we have this flood of money coming in, both raised by candidates and by outside groups, is a real threat to our democracy.
Q: With so many TV ads this year in your race, do you think they really continued to work?
A: It does work. You can see from polling results how negative advertising is affecting your standing. In the last month of the campaign we did three polls. We could see in each of those polls how negative advertising was affecting the voters’ choices.
It’s kind of uncanny in a way. We think of it as more of an art than a science, but it really is more of a science. You can see from polling results if you have good polls. We saw as attacks were used, how my voting margin narrowed.
Q: What are your plans?
A: My immediate plan is to spend a lot of time with Nancy, the grandkids and my daughters. I’ve been enjoying already the freedom of not having an intense schedule. It usually lightens up anyway around the holidays but it’s even lighter now because of the outcome.
That means going to sporting events, soccer games, cross country, to plays.
I’ve been to more activities with my grandkids in the last three or four weeks than I had been to for the better part of a year. It feels really good.
