CHANGING DIRECTIONS: AZ POLITICS, POST-SHOOTING TRAGEDY

posted by Michael Chihak

Media accounts in recent days about the pace and potential outcome of recovery for Democratic U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords have engendered and added to much speculation -- read gossip -- swirling around Arizona politics this week.

Arizona Week will focus on the political story on Friday's program, looking at how the Jan. 8 shooting of Giffords and her subsequent lengthy hospital and rehabilitation stints, are driving the political dynamic in the state.

The biggest burst of political speculaton came on Monday from Newsweek magazine, which published a lengthy story headlined “What’s Really Going On With Gabby Giffords?”. The story claimed to include previously untold information about Giffords' recovery from a gunshot wound that passed through the left side of her brain.

Indeed, the story lent more insight to what the situation is with Giffords, including the statement that “a measured assessment of her progress is warranted.” Meaning that we the public may well be going too far with our own hopeful interpretations of the optimistic statements from the doctors and the visitors to her rehab room in Houston.

Most prominent among those optimists is Giffords’ husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, who has, as Newsweek pointed out, said from the beginning that he believed she would make a full recovery. But in the story, Kelly was quoted as saying that his wife’s first public appearance is “months – and not weeks – away.”

In her personal life, it would mean as Kelly and her staff have said that if Giffords does attend his shuttle launch scheduled for later this month, she won’t be seen publicly. It also means that recovery is a process that dictates the time line rather than the recoverer.

Or, for that matter, the political observers, challengers and would-be opponents to her waiting in the wings.

This and other information in the Newsweek story, speculative comments in the Arizona media and the silent but obvious impatience of those who would challenge Giffords politically next year have fueled discussion around a series of fitful -- and mostly unanswerable at the moment -- questions.

• Will she recover quickly and completely enough to run for the seat Republican Sen. Jon Kyl is leaving?

• Will she recover and then stay put in Congressional District 8, where she could face a rematch with Republican Jesse Kelly, the tea party agenda carrier whom Giffords defeated in 2010?

• Will she recover enough so that she can live some definition of a normal existence, never mind the lights-are-always-on life of a member of Congress?

People of all sorts – in her camp, in her would-be opponents’ camps and in the general public – are running in all directions with speculation.

Human nature being what it is, there’s a desire for that. But really, we must ask ourselves, is there a need for it?