Rep. Stephanie Herseth was featured in an article about the best and brightest women in the nation in this month's Esquire Magazine. Excerpt:
At thirty-five, Herseth is South Dakota's golden girl. Her grandfather was governor, her grandmother secretary of state, her father a popular state legislator for twenty years. She was high school valedictorian, got a master's and a law degree from an elite East Coast university, and got elected to Congress at the tender age of thirty-three. She's a Democrat who opposes gun control so completely, she's endorsed by the NRA and part of the small group of conservative Democrats who continue to support the war in Iraq. "This is one of those things where I've made myself available to work with the administration," she says. "I'm just not looking to make this partisan. Not only will I lose support among my constituency if I do that, but I just don't think it's going to get us where we need to be."
But Herseth is also capable of giving a fiery partisan speech that attacks Republicans for running a corrupt and secretive government that neglects the actual concerns of the people. I saw her do this twice, and she was very accomplished at it, slicing and dicing her opponents just like a seasoned politician. And she remains firmly in support of a woman's right to an abortion, a risky stance in a state so red that it recently banned abortion even in cases of rape or incest.
So Herseth is planting her feet, feeling her strength, looking for her moment. But in two promising ways, she's very much like the other four women. She's surprisingly open and straightforward in person, talking easily about the time she freaked out and flew to Quito, Ecuador, or her childhood on the farm with the tornadoes and the drought, or her parents' divorce after her father lost the '86 election.
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She's also relentlessly focused on her goal. Right now, we've been on the highways of South Dakota for fourteen hours, and the Dixie Chicks are in the CD player, and there's one more rally to go, one more high school gym with farmers and housewives dressed in cheap, clean clothes, one more speech about how ethanol pulled $1 billion into South Dakota in 2004, a lifeline to rural America, because most of the biorefineries are owned by local farmers and ranchers, which helps the tax base and the school district, as long as federal policies don't encourage the kind of consolidation we've seen in other industries.
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