Darcy Burner's second campaign for Congress will be more personal. She will talk more about herself, her family, and, she says, why she wants to be in Congress. But there's no dramatically different Burner 2.0 about to be launched in the 8th Congressional District.

I talked to Burner last week. She laughed when I asked if she feels suddenly unconstrained by the control of the first campaign and her overly careful media consultants who didn't show the real Burner.

Burner: Certainly it was a huge learning experience for me and I listened to the best advice I could get about how you run a campaign. I have a much better understanding at this point about how you talk to voters and I'm much more comfortable doing it. My experience so far is that the more people who understand who I am and why I'm doing this, genuinely, the better off I'm going to be in the election.

PoP: How much advice did they give you and is it hard when you get in a race to say to D.C., "Back off, it's my campaign"?

Burner: I don't view D.C. as ever being a problem in my race. The Republicans in D.C. were a problem. But on the Democratic side, to be honest, they never tried to tell us what we had to do or say.

PoP: Are there things that you now count as mistakes or missteps on your part?

Burner: I think we did incredibly well in taking the race from something that wasn't on anybody's radar in January 2006 and doing better than any Democrat has ever done in the 8th District. And I'm incredibly proud of not only what my campaign team did and what I did but also the enormous amount of volunteer effort was just phenomenal. That's the kind of race we've never seen before in the 8th.

PoP: OK, that's what's going well. Are there mistakes?

Burner: There are certainly things we learned. We have a lot more information about voters in the district and some of the issues and what dirty tricks to expect from the other side. I admit I wasn't expecting them to make 585,000 voter contact phone calls in the last 96 hours, some of which said things like, 'Darcy Burner is about to be indicted for a felony.' And yes, that's illegal.

(I hadn't heard about any "indictment" calls. Burner insists they happened, but couldn't say with certainty that they came from the Republican Party voter contact program.)

Circumstances have changed as well. Burner spent a lot of her campaign last year criticizing Reichert's support of President Bush's policies and agenda. Bush won't be on the ballot this year and it likely won't work to focus so much on him. But she says the biggest change is she can start the race with name recognition.

Burner: We have an opportunity this time out to give people a better sense of who I am why I am doing this. Almost every conversation I had with a voter last time out began with, 'Who are you again and what are you running for?' And it was so difficult to get past that in face-to-face conversations, in mail to people, in putting together television ads. That was a huge problem and this time we can talk a lot more about why I'm doing this.

PoP: And why is that?

Burmer: I feel a personal responsibility for the kind of world we leave my 4 1/2-year-old son and I don't know how I'd live with my self if I didn't try to do something to make it the kind of world that he and all of his peers deserve.

Talking about being motivated to run for her son's sake rather than just to boot out Reichert and take a poke at the president is one way Burner will personalize her race. She also has very personal anecdotes at the ready that she hopes shows that the major issues of the day are not abstractions.

Talking about health care, Burner brings up her sister's complicated pregnancy that led to doctor-ordered bed rest, which led to her losing her job and health insurance.

She and her husband went into bankruptcy. They basically lost everything. She had to get her health care at the local emergency room. When we talk about people not being able to get the kind of health care they need, that's not an abstraction to me. I was sending her money to make sure she could feed her family as she was going through this.

Same goes for the war, she says, mentioning her brother who left the Army after 20 years in the service, including time in Iraq.

He has not been able to find regular work to feed his family. The job placement that they say that they'll do for members of the military is not working. I strongly suspect he is suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and can't get the help he needs. The G.I. benefits have been cut so much he can't go back to school. So when we're talking about veterans coming back and struggling, that's my family.

When Burner brings up the April U.S. Supreme Court decision upholding a federal ban on certain late-term abortions, she talks about her own troubles conceiving and the medical complications when she was pregnant with her son, Henry.

They considered it a medical miracle that we managed to survive it. It was incredibly complicated. But the thing was, at every step of the way when there was yet another problem that was potentially life-threatening or health-threatening, my doctor and I would sit down and talk about it. And I was completely committed to doing everything I could for Henry. But those decisions are mine, not some politician's.

Burner brought Reichert up a lot, and she is running as if he were the opponent. But she first has a primary opponent, state Sen. Rodney Tom, D-Medina.

PoP: Do you talk about Rod Tom's recent conversion to the party? Is that an issue you raise?

Burner: I don't talk about him much at all, as you may have noticed. I mean, certainly Senator Tom and I walk in with very different things that we bring to the table and I don't think there are many people who are paying attention right now who aren't aware of what those ... are.

PoP: Are you talking experience? Tell me. I'm somewhat aware ...

Burner: Well, as an example; the question of the direction we want to take representation in the district. I'm not a professional politician and I've never made any secret of that. What I am is somebody who understands where the people in the district are coming from and what kind of things they're struggling with. I understand the economic engines of the district incredibly well as someone who is in technology in one of the most technology dependent districts in the country. And my values and priorities are different. For example, I would never have voted to override the voters' desire to provide cost-of-living increases to teachers. My dad was a public school teacher for 23 years after he retired from the Air Force and I wore hand me down clothes from my brothers because we didn't have enough money for clothes for all the kids. To say you are going to override those cost of living increases is something I would never do.

PoP: A lot of Democrats did, too, didn't they?

Burner: Haven't looked specifically at the vote. I know then-Representative Tom voted to override them.

PoP: The Legislature as a whole voted to suspend that initiative.

Burner: And I wouldn't have. I mean, teachers are obviously undervalued as it is. I would never take it out of their hides.

NOTE: Burner is just putting together her campaign organization. She said her direct mail consultant from '06, Blair Butterworth, will do the same this time as will her fundraiser, Colby Underwood. Consultant Sandeep Kaushik is doing some part-time press work for Burner and sat in on most of my interview with her.