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I'm not trying to be John Dingell. I'm Debbie Dingell." During a recent morning of shadowing the freshman representative from Michigan, I learn that this is about as philosophical as she wants to get on the complexities of inheriting a seat—and a legacy—from her husband, former Rep. John Dingell, the longest-serving member in the history of Capitol Hill.

Debbie Dingell is known for her wry warmth: In the Cannon House Office Building—her glasses pushed rakishly back over flyaway blond hair—she greets friends as "honey," with a kiss on the cheek. But on the question of her larger-than-life predecessor, she has been sticking to answers such as, "I'm not trying to fill his shoes." "We're just two different people," she says, with a hint of a sigh, when I ask about her husband for the umpteenth time.

It's easy to see why Debbie—who is 61 to John's 88, and who met and married him when she was in her twenties and he was already a powerful member of the House—is tired of talking about it. She has been fielding this line of inquiry since the moment she announced she would compete to succeed him. ("Debbie Dingell Poised to Keep U.S. House Seat in the Family," proclaimed an NPR story in February 2014.) More-recent coverage has been in the same vein. ("Debbie Dingell Ready for Spotlight as Her Husband, the 'Dean' of Congress, Steps Aside," observed The New York Times in November.)

Granted, it's impossible to understand this consummate Washington spouse without considering her iconic husband—who came to Capitol Hill as a page in 1938. But Debbie, as she says, isn't John. While she calls her husband "the most important thing in my life"—and while their political commonalities dwarf their differences—it's also true that her tenure on the Hill will not be a carbon copy of his.

Even before she ran for office, Debbie Dingell always guarded her own identity. She worked at General Motors for 32 years (she's a scion of Michigan auto royalty: the Fisher family of Fisher Body) and has said often that she stayed at GM in part because she already had the job when she and John met—so no one could assume that her powerful husband got it for her.

Dingell also built her own CV in politics, as a member of the Democratic National Committee. Before she met her husband, she wrote her master's thesis at Georgetown on "civility in Congress"; in the 1990s, she helped start a series of bipartisan lunches (with Marlene Malek, wife of GOP donor and strategist Fred Malek) for well-to-do Washington women, which has continued ever since. "I don't know that I have the contacts that Debbie has in this town," Minority Whip Steny Hoyer recently told The New York Times.

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