A New Hampshire mom walks her talk for Ron Paul

The underdog presidential candidate captures support from a New Hampshire nonconformist who's been teased by the big boys, too.

from the September 6, 2007 edition

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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.

She has pulled herself up, too. Though she never went to college, she took extension classes, landed work as a freelance graphic designer, and started to devour books on history, science, and politics. She and her husband are behind on their heating and doctors' bills and struggle some months to pay rent. But they have finally made it to Silver Street, the thoroughfare of stately Victorians where the rich kids lived when she was a girl.

"I dreamed all my life of living on this street," she says outside her house, looking up at the three-story structure.

She'd heard of Paul, a onetime Libertarian Party candidate, whose opposition to taxes, government social programs, and the Iraq war in many ways jibed with her own. But as the 2008 presidential campaigns rolled into New Hampshire, which holds the nation's first primary, she also came to see him as a fellow traveler: a long-shot who'd been dismissed too early, a nonconformist teased by the big boys because he was a little different.

After reading transcripts of his speeches on his Congressional website, she remembers thinking, "There's really somebody out there."

Her plan to walk 38 miles to Concord came as a surprise to Paul's local campaign staff.

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