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  Will Liddy’s opponent give his vote to her?

BY ROSE POST
SALISBURY POST

Don’t laugh.

Just listen: *itIt has happened before.

When Liddy ran for president of the Woman’s College of Duke University, that’s what her opponent did.

‘‘She seemed by far the better candidate,’’ says Karen Black Miller, today a paralegal in a Greensboro law firm. ‘‘I told all my friends, ‘We’ve got to work for her. She’s good.’ She had plans. I didn’t. I was just saying vote for me because I was cute and we’d have fun. But she was organized – and she accomplished some of the things she talked about.’’

Would she vote for her again now?

‘‘I probably *itwill vote for her if I get a chance,’’ she says, laughing happily at the memory of that first time.

That unexpected tidbit was turned up by Mary Leonard, a reporter for the Boston Globe in the Washington Bureau, during a couple of days in North Carolina.

Leonard is one of a steady stream of reporters from newspapers and magazines who call or come to Salisbury to learn about Liddy, who wants to be the GOP candidate for president of the United States.

After much advance research, Leonard came here for an afternoon and evening, visited the Big Pig and declared Rowan County barbecue and Cheerwine great – and talked to Liddy’s brother, John, of Charlotte and old friends Mack and Meetta Lampert, Margaret Kluttz and Peggy Looney.

Then she went to Durham and Duke University, where archivist Bill King, who, like Liddy, is also a Salisbury native and a graduate of Boyden High and Duke, helped her go through old student newspapers to find the names of fellow students who weren’t necessarily her friends.

That’s how she found Karen Miller. She called Miller – and was thoroughly surprised when Miller said she voted for Liddy, not herself.

Not that she came to do an ‘‘investigative piece,’’ she says.

She was after background.

‘‘What was the town, what were the forces, who were the friends and family that helped form her? And what was it like for a young woman coming of age in the ‘50s?’’

Leonard, about 10 years younger than Dole, is from Chicago, with a graduate degree in journalism from Northwestern University. She married the Washington correspondent for Chicago Today 25 years ago, and they and their two daughters have lived in Washington ever since.

And, largely because no one else in the bureau was interested, she covers women in politics, gender issues at work, in health, sexual harassment, discrimination ...

She laughs.

‘‘Obviously, during the impeachment, I did quite a bit on the feminist position on Monica – who Monica was, what Monica was like.’’

And ditto Hillary Clinton.

‘‘What I really did was chronicle her sort of meteoric rise in the polls as she looked more and more like a victim. She finally got her place by standing by her man, a traditional role.

‘‘Last year I watched her campaigning for other candidates, and it was sort of a preview for this Senate race. She was acting like a candidate and testing the waters over and over again.’’

Hillary is the most speculated-about story in Washington, she says, and the biggest mystery. She doesn’t give interviews.

‘‘Some of us think it’s because she has such a strong dislike for the press,’’ she says. ‘‘I think she thinks the less said the better. She can go over the press and reach the people with her very polished performance. She’s really something.

‘‘What was so remarkable to me was how last fall, with all this going on, she would get out and campaign for Democratic candidates. She would just glow. You would think with all that was going on at home ... ‘’

Leonard says there’s a sense among the political pundits that Elizabeth Dole’s campaign is not gaining political altitude, that she’s ‘‘reluctant to mix it up with the press. At this point, her staff has seemed to keep her at arm’s length from press people.

‘‘What that leads to is having people wonder whether she’s prepared for the rough and tumble primary campaign, which can be very dynamic and fast moving, and you sort of need to be quick on your feet.’’

Then she thinks a moment.

Twenty-five years in Washington, she says, ‘‘have taught me that the person who is the alleged front runner a year out is hardly ever the candidate.’’

So she didn’t come to North Carolina to talk about any of that.

‘‘I’ve come,’’ she says, ‘‘to look for her roots and try to put it in some context, to put the candidate Dole into the context of the times in which she grew up, the people with whom she grew up, and how this could have formed her attitudes as a career woman, a person who has broken down barriers, who has gone over some fairly high hurdles.’’

Some early things that sort of made Liddy tick are obvious.

‘‘She came from a fairly secure and privileged family that gave her lots of encouragement. She didn’t come along at the time of angry feminists but was encouraged to be all she could be ....

‘‘Her time sort of predated feminism as a movement, and it certainly seems that while she was definitely within a group of exceptional young women at that time, she seemed to have goals and ambitions that exceeded theirs.

‘‘It’s almost as though – when she came along – women didn’t know they were supposed to be angry.’’

By the time Leonard’s generation came of age, they knew they could have a career, husband, children, travel, all this – and get angry.

She stops, a little surprised at her own words.

‘‘Gosh!’’ she says. ‘‘I could write a whole magazine piece,’’ even though her assignment was a single newspaper story.

But she liked Salisbury and Duke and Liddy’s friends and family – and her bosses in Boston liked her story.

That’s encouraging.

Now, she figures, ‘‘I have to do the Boston years, the Harvard years.’’ But not immediately.

‘‘I’m fascinated by her,’’ she confesses, ‘‘and I hope they’ll let me stay on the story.’’

Finding Karen Black Miller and discovering after 41 years that she voted for Liddy Dole and told her supporters to was exciting – and Leonard understands why she did it.

Today, she says, Elizabeth Dole ‘‘has something greater to prove: that she has the strength, stomach and savvy to compete in a large field of Republican men to become the first female presidential candidate of either major party.’’

And she understands why her friends at home aren’t surprised.

They still see her, Leonard wrote, as ‘‘both a pioneer and a work in progress’’ with her eye on the biggest prize.