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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"She just called me and told me what she was going to do," recalls Jared Chicoine, the campaign's New Hampshire coordinator. He says he received her news release at the same time the media did.

"I remember calling her several times and saying, 'What can we do for you?'" he says. "I was willing to follow her in a vehicle, willing to do just about everything to make sure she had what she needed. She said she had it taken care of."

Saturday, Aug. 4 dawned hot – temperatures would reach the 90s – confirming some of her relatives' worst fears. Halldorson is spirited and petite, but no athlete. "I just said, 'Do you really think you ought to be doing this?'" recalls her mother, Ann Grenier. Her husband, Jeff Halldorson, was more blunt: "I thought she was nuts."

Kelly stepped onto Route 9, the rural highway running west to Concord, at 5:30 a.m., with a campaign sign and a backpack of campaign literature and CDs she'd burned with radio interviews of Paul. The walk was fine through lunch – mile 15 – at Susty's Radical Vegan restaurant in Northwood. Clusters of Paul supporters on the roadside cheered her on. A news reporter swooped in to check on her progress. Paul himself made a surprise call to wish her well. But in the afternoon, as the sun beat down and her toenails began to snap off, she grew weary. Through a miscommunication, her husband was waiting with water in the wrong place.

Just as she was ready to sit down, in despair, on the pavement, she says, she spied three people on the roadside: a trio of Ron Paul supporters, one holding a cold bottle of water. "Oh, my word!" she recalled. "It was like an oasis."

She climbed the steps of the state capital in Concord at 9:30 p.m., tired but triumphant.

Paul says the Stephanopoulos interview gave the campaign a number of unexpected boosts.

"People got angry," says Paul, who drew the support of 3 percent of probable GOP voters in the latest national poll. "That meant they sent more money. It was just another stimulus."

It has also lent Kelly Halldorson's life a new kind of momentum, and a sense of the impact one person can make. News coverage of her walk drew e-mails from around the country. "Kelly's my hero!" one wrote. "Thanks for the inspiration," said another. A Texas man posted a photo online of a T-shirt he'd designed, with the inscription "Paul/Halldorson 2008."

Her kids have made accommodations with her new calling. Zoë, 9, has become a little helper: She wrote "Ron Paul" in crayon on a scrap of notebook paper, fastened it to a wooden stake with a Ron Paul bumper sticker, and plunged it into their front lawn.

But Griffin, 11, is more ambivalent. He likes Ron Paul, he told his mom. But, he's also told her, "you're too crazy about him."

A few days after her walk to Concord, Halldorson started her next project: a roadway trash pickup she hoped to take national. "I decided we could help Ron Paul clean up not just Washington but the whole country," she wrote in the news release.

And so this soldier marches on.

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