The Doleful State of Liddy's Race
HAM, MARY KATHARINE
The Doleful State of Liddy’s Race Another red state cliffhanger. BY MARY KATHARINE HAM Senator Elizabeth Dole breezed into the lobby of the Raleigh Marriott on October 15 after a day of...
...Dole’s ads dub Hagan “Fibber Kay” and point out that state debt doubled while she was writing the budget, that she voted for state tax hikes, and that she has repeatedly dodged questions on contentious issues like offshore drilling...
...In the waning days, if it looks like John McCain will lose the state, Dole could argue to independent voters that she is standing between them and powerful oneparty rule in Washington, Hood says...
...Securing funding for immigration enforcement and textile import regulation are crowd pleasers...
...BY MARY KATHARINE HAM Senator Elizabeth Dole breezed into the lobby of the Raleigh Marriott on October 15 after a day of crisscrossing the state, greeting surprised voters as she made her way to the elevator...
...New independent voters are the ones Dole’s in danger of losing, Hood says...
...She has trailed in all three Rasmussen polls conducted after the collapse of Lehman Brothers set off a global fi nancial panic...
...She leaves her attacks mostly for her ads, which started in September...
...A new ad, in which Dole speaks directly to the camera outside her family home about her work on Fannie/ Freddie legislation, offshore drilling, and tax reduction showcases the strategy for the homestretch...
...But the state of North Carolina, no stranger to tough, expensive, close Senate races, is not about to let Liddy Dole glide to reelection without a fi ght...
...She’s in a dogfi ght here, but it’s not as though she’s in the Last Chance Saloon and she’s gotta gamble,” Taylor said...
...Dole needs to reintroduce herself to voters,” says Hood, many of whom are new to the state and know her as the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s unsuccessful efforts in 2006, not as a hometown girl...
...She’s gotta emphasize the fact that she’s an effective senator...
...State University, thinks the Dole campaign has had trouble countering the charge that she’s ineffective until her latest round of ads...
...In both Washington and in the Tar Heel State, Republicans have pegged Dole’s as perhaps the most important seat to keep to prevent a Democratic supermajority in the Senate...
...She was at an event with the motorcycle club Rolling Thunder and declared her desire to ride on the back of one of the Harleys...
...On the campaign trail, Dole is polished and feminine, the softness of her Salisbury accent and southern manners still evident after a career in Washington’s hard corridors, and the “Dole Stroll” is relaxed, as she moves like a talk show host in and around her audience...
...The investment, she says, shows she “cares enough to put some skin in the game...
...In tow was not an entourage but an ever-present garment bag and a selection of colorful suits—a testament to the unpredictability of the campaign trail, and the humidity of her home state...
...I’m not really running against Kay,” Dole said...
...I’m running against Chuck [Schumer...
...Republican gubernatorial candidate Pat McCrory has used the scandals to his advantage in taking on Lieutenant Governor Bev Perdue and leads that race by several points...
...But you don’t let these things get you hung up...
...A quirky DSCC ad featuring two codgers in rocking chairs has been the most talked-about ad of the cycle, as the two argue over whether Liddy Dole is “92 or 93...
...1,068) earlier in the week, telling them about a time her hanging bag had served her well...
...In 2002, she earned the endorsement of her predecessor, Jesse Helms, upon his retirement from the Senate, and she toured the state as a celebrity before her 8-point win over former Clinton White House chief of staff Erskine Bowles...
...She tells of chasing fellow Republican Charles Grassley of Iowa to the airport to woo him on the 2004 tobacco quota buyout, an economic boon to North Carolina farmers that Obama surrogates in the state have hammered John McCain for opposing...
...She hopes that if Obama wins in North Carolina, he has short coattails...
...Dole has thrown some of her own money into the race...
...It was 80 degrees in the Sandhills when Dole addressed a small crowd at a bed-and-breakfast in Ellerbe, N.C...
...On the stump, Dole focuses on her work for North Carolina in the Senate, sometimes lacing her sentences with one too many Washington acronyms for an incumbent running in a change election, but she usually corrects herself quickly...
...The fi gures ostensibly represent the percentage of the time she has voted with Bush and her effectiveness rating (i.e., 93rd out of 100 senators), but that’s not how many interpret them...
...Republican general assembly candidates are also benefi ting...
...Andy Taylor, a political science professor at N.C...
...Hagan, a lawyer and 10-year state senator who sat on the budget committee, is up 3.4 points in the Real Clear Politics poll average—a substantial shift since August when the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) began an $8 million TV campaign on her behalf...
...Given that the prevailing winds are behind the backs of Democrats anyway,” Dole is “in a heap of trouble,” he says...
...I think it was very unfair in many respects,” Dole said of the ad...
...North Carolina has added about 200,000 independent voters this year, according to the state board of elections...
...Hagan, recruited by Schumer to run for the seat when other prominent state Democrats demurred in the face of Dole’s popularity, effectively undermined Dole’s image in the month before the economic crisis took hold of the headlines...
...The event staff lectured her about liability, but she was insistent, and went to change into a pantsuit...
...I didn’t have one, but I had a suit with a wide skirt,” she said as she laughed about looks from people who realized it was Dole on the back of a bike...
...pop...
...You see, with that skirt, I was showing quite a bit of leg...
...But favorite-daughter status has not been enough to keep Dole’s upstart opponent, Kay Hagan, from painting her as an absentee, out of touch and ineffective...
...Barack Obama’s and Hagan’s leads here suggest the state may be poised to reverse a trend of voting Republican in national elections and Democrat in state elections, says John Hood, head of the John Locke Foundation, a free-market think tank based in Raleigh...
...McCrory’s rise and Dole’s struggle illustrate the political complications of a state with signifi - cant population growth, fairly evenly split between the left-leaning highly educated voters of its metro areas and the right-leaning churchgoing voters of its rural areas...
...Here’s one way to go after a candidate’s age,” wrote Ben Smith of the Politico, noting that Dole is one month older than John McCain...
...The Dole campaign has declined to try to connect Hagan with a wave of corruption in the state Democratic party, which culminated in former house speaker Jim Black being thrown in prison for offering bribes for votes and accepting illegal donations...
...Mary Katharine Ham writes for THE BLOG at weeklystandard.com...
...In the process, the campaigns spent upwards of $13 million apiece...
...She touts her 2005 cosponsorship of a bill that would have subjected Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to stricter regulation, which elicits applause and “Amens...
...Since then, the news has been worse for Dole...
Vol. 14 • October 2008 • No. 7
