Ron Barber, former Gabby Giffords aide, sees race as call to civility

TUCSON, Ariz. — Ten miles down the road from the Safeway where he nearly lost his life last January, Ron Barber is holding court with some three dozen supporters.

It’s a sunny Thursday afternoon, 454 days since a bullet shot at point-blank range by alleged gunman Jared Lee Loughner passed through former congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s (D-Ariz.) head, and 454 days since two separate bullets struck Barber, then Giffords’s district director, in the left cheek and thigh.

As he explains to volunteers his reasons for running to succeed his former boss in Congress, the bespectacled, soft-spoken Barber — who until recently walked with the aid of a cane — doesn’t shy away from mentioning the shooting that took the lives of six, left 13 wounded and would forever enter into the political lexicon the name of this city in the Sonoran Desert.

But he argues that the incident that almost ended his life was actually the beginning of something greater.

“We were not defined by the day of January the 8th,” he tells the volunteers gathered at his downtown campaign headquarters for a joint event with the No. 2 House Democrat, Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (Md.). “We were defined by what happened afterward.”

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Who will succeed Gabby Giffords? (Friday’s Trail Mix video)

Ron Barber, Gabby Giffords’s former district director, is running in this June’s special election and November’s general election for the Arizona Democrat’s former House seat.

Will he succeed?

We take a closer look at Barber’s candidacy in a separate piece this morning. But in the meantime, today’s Trail Mix video gives a preview of the race from the ground in Arizona: