You’ve probably heard of Jeff Flake, the cowboyish Arizonan. You know a bit about Tim Scott. And you definitely know Ted Cruz by now. But the fourth freshman Republican senator has dodged countless spotlights, flying under the radar and into the upper chamber of Congress. She’s Deb Fischer, she’s a rancher from Nebraska, she’s not a tea-party senator (despite what you might hear), and she’s a bit of a wonk on agricultural affairs. While Todd Akin and Richard Mourdock were busily generating headlines and sparking controversy in the 2012 Senate contests, Fischer quietly beat two tea-party-backed opponents in her primary and a thick-walleted Manhattan darling in the general election. It doesn’t really make for compelling television — while we were biting our nails over Scott Brown and Elizabeth Warren, Deb Fischer was beating her opponent and still beating him and beating him all the way home. She’s a Republican from a red state and she could be a star — she’s straightforward, pragmatic, and female — but she’s dodged the press as if she’s Terrence Malick or Greta Garbo. She did a short interview with a Nebraska TV station and the Hill did a feature on her as New Member of the Week, but she turned down invitations to all six Sunday shows on her first weekend in Washington. After she won the primary, she went head-to-head with Bob Kerrey, former governor and senator from the Cornhusker State who became a Manhattan transplant and president of the New School in Greenwich Village. Steve Martin made a whimsical campaign video for Kerrey, and former SNL writer Sarah Paley, a lifelong New Yorker who is Kerrey’s wife, wrote a sassy essay for Vogue bemoaning the fact that her husband’s fidelity made a move to flyover country unavoidable, should he win. On Election Day, Fischer trounced Kerrey, winning by 16 points...
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