A New Hampshire mom walks her talk for Ron Paul

Before her recent leap into presidential politics, Kelly Halldorson, in bell-bottoms and Birkenstocks, would have struck most folks as little more than a slightly crunchy soccer mom. She drives a Chevy Suburban, home-schools her three children and, in free moments between her kids' ballet and hockey practice, does Pilates.

Then, in July, she watched George Stephanopoulos interview Texas Congressman Ron Paul, the maverick Republican presidential candidate. And her life changed.

"What's success for you in this campaign?" Mr. Stephanopoulos asked that Sunday on ABC's "This Week."

"Well, to win," Representative Paul said.

"That's not going to happen," Stephanopoulos shot back.

"Do you ... do you know for absolute?" Paul asked, looking a little like a deer in the headlights as he groped for a reply. "Are you willing to bet your every cent in your pocket for that?"

"Yes," said Stephanopoulos, grinning.

Recalling the exchange recently, Ms. Halldorson frowned and shook her head.

"Acch!" she says of Stephanopoulos, on an evening stroll near her home in this former mill town, a 20-minute drive northwest of Portsmouth. "The arrogance was just seeping from him. Since when did journalists become prophets?"

And so a political activist was born.

Halldorson had never so much as sunk a campaign sign on her lawn. Now she was sitting with her kids around a laptop at the kitchen table and plotting a solitary protest march through the summer heat. Her plan: walk 38 miles, in a hand-made Ron Paul Revolution T-shirt, from her home here to the steps of the state capital in Concord.

The pundits had written Paul off as a footnote to the 2008 race. She resolved to prove them wrong.

"This way, someone will listen to me," she recalled thinking. "And listen to him."

Despite single-digit poll numbers, Paul is famous for the fervency of his following, a motley group that ranges from gun lovers and tax haters to pacifists and libertarians.

But Halldorson's story illustrates something more: the alchemy, often as political as it is personal, that can turn an ordinary citizen into a campaign soldier.

In many ways, Halldorson's road to Concord began in childhood. She grew up in a public housing project next to a highway here, raised by a single mother who for a time was on welfare. She went to school with kids who lived in bigger houses, wore fancier clothes, and were often not allowed – because of their parents' prejudice – to visit her in the projects.

As a teenager, she cultivated a defiant identity. She scrawled "Question Authority" on the covers of her textbooks. She decorated her jeans in hand-drawn peace signs. Once, she heated a peace-symbol earring with a lighter and tried to brand her hip, leaving a smudgy burn.

When students walked out of Dover High School in 1991 to protest the first Gulf War, she hung back, to protest the protest, even though she agreed with their message. Most of her classmates, she felt, were just looking for an excuse to skip class. "I was grumpy," Halldorson says, laughing at the memory. "I thought the kids weren't being authentic."

Adrift after high school and searching for her own kind of authenticity, she enlisted a pair of children she baby-sat to paint flowers on her Volkswagen Golf. Then she drove to Southern California with her boyfriend, who would later become her husband, and moved in with an aunt.

Halldorson's worldview, she says, took shape after the 1994 earthquake that devastated nearby Northridge. Her aunt, Ellen Fitzmaurice, a strong-willed libertarian, gave Halldorson Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" and ranted against what she saw as the wasteful federal response to the disaster.

Halldorson left Los Angeles convinced that people should rely on each other, not the government, when things get rough.

After she and her husband, a construction worker, returned here, she tried to live by that code. When private school got too expensive, she chose to teach her children at home rather than send them to public school. When her son Griffin chipped his tooth, she went to a community dental clinic that paid for his care from private donations rather than government subsidies.

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