Dole's manner masks mettle

She fights tough re-election battle with her usual velvet touch In a tough fight, she notes that she blazed trails for women

HIGH POINT -- Despite a style that seems lifted from the genteel pages of Southern Living magazine, Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole has always displayed an intense drive to succeed in public life.

That drive separated her from many women of her pre-feminist generation. It led her to build a deep and impressive Washington resume. Now, locked in a tough re-election campaign, Dole is reminding voters that she is more than "Little Miss Perfect," which New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd once called her.

"I've had to break a few [glass ceilings] as I came along," Dole said at a GOP rally in High Point last week.

These are trying times for Dole, who is facing an unexpectedly stiff challenge from Democratic state Sen. Kay Hagan of Greensboro.

With change, rather than Washington experience, the mantra of this election, Dole is increasingly reminding voters that she once personified change.

Dole, 72, grew up in an era with different expectations for women.

The daughter of a prosperous Salisbury wholesale florist, Elizabeth Hanford Dole was May Queen (and student government president) at Duke University and made her debut at the Raleigh debutante ball. Though her only North Carolina residence is her late parents' handsome Tudor-style house, her North Carolina accent remains undiluted by her Potomac years.

Her style is still very much 1950s North Carolina. She's always smartly dressed and displays a get-more-bees-with-honey style of graciousness. Dole's manner belies an ambition that prompted her a decade ago to try to become the first female president of the United States.

If her upbringing was small-town Southern traditional, Dole's drive set her apart from many of her contemporaries. When she told her mother that she would attend Harvard Law School instead of settling down to raise a family, her mother could be heard retching that night in her hotel room. Dole would not marry until she was 39, and she would never have children.

In a joint memoir written with her husband, "The Doles: Unlimited Partners," she put it this way: "In my imagination I caught the rhythm of a different drummer. It beat a cadence familiar since childhood. Life was more than a spectator sport, and I couldn't settle for observer status."

Friends say Dole is driven to succeed and to repeatedly prove herself -- perhaps a holdover from an era when it was far more difficult for women to rise to positions of leadership.

"She is somebody who in early life decided that she wanted to be in public service and to succeed in everything she undertook," said Wyndham Robertson, a former University of North Carolina vice president who grew up with Dole.

Few people in American politics can match Dole's blue-chip resume: White House aide, transportation secretary, labor secretary, American Red Cross president, U.S. Senator, presidential candidate and spouse of a presidential candidate.

A seasoned leader

She played important roles in requiring brake lights on cars, privatizing national freight railroad, and pressuring states to raise the drinking age. Even in the current anti-Washington climate, Dole thinks her experience in heading giant organizations should count for something with voters.

Democrats have sought to portray Dole as a carpetbagger who has not lived in the state since the 1950s. One of Hagan's favorite lines is that voters should give Dole a pair of ruby red slippers -- like Dorothy in the movie "The Wizard of Oz" -- so she can click her heels and return home to Kansas.

"I think people understand that you can't run the Red Cross from Salisbury," Dole said in an interview last week. "You can't run a Cabinet agency from Salisbury."