Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R) Elected 2002, 1st term up 2008
Born:	July 29, 1936, Salisbury
Home:	Salisbury
Education:	Duke U., B.A. 1958, Harvard U., M.A. 1960, J.D. 1965
Religion:	Methodist
Marital Status:	married (Robert)
Professional Career:	Deputy Asst., U.S. Consumer Affairs, 1969-73; Fed. Trade Commission, 1973-79; Public liason, U.S. Pres. Ronald Reagan, 1981-83; Secy., U.S. Dept. of Trans., 1983-87; Secy., Dept. of Labor, 1989-90; Pres., Amer. Red Cross, 1991-95, 1997-99.
DC Office	555 DSOB20510, 202-224-6342; Fax: 202-224-1100; Web site: dole.senate.gov
State Offices	Greenville, 252-329-1093; Hendersonville, 828-698-3747; Raleigh, 919-856-4630; Salisbury, 704-633-5011.
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Elizabeth Dole, former Secretary of Transportation and Secretary of Labor, former president of the American Red Cross and candidate for president, was elected senator from North Carolina in 2002. She grew up in Salisbury, in the Piedmont textile country between Charlotte and Greensboro; her father was a wholesale florist and her mother had the pleasure of attending, at 101, her daughter's election night celebration. Elizabeth Hanford, as she then was, graduated from Duke, got a master's in education at Harvard and taught school in Boston. She spent the summer of 1960 working in the office of North Carolina Senator B. Everett Jordan; in the fall, she worked on Lyndon Johnson's campaign train through the South. In 1962 she went to Harvard Law School, one of 29 women in a class of 550; her classmates included future Congresswomen Patricia Schroeder and Elizabeth Holtzman. In summers she worked at the Peace Corps headquarters, the United Nations and Oxford University. After graduation she practiced law briefly in Washington. With help from Democratic Governor Terry Sanford she got a job at HEW, then at the White House Office of Consumer Affairs. She stayed on after the change in administrations in 1969 and changed her registration from Democratic to Independent; she worked on projects like freshness dating on food products and a conference on hunger in America. In 1973 she was nominated to a six-year term on the Federal Trade Commission. In 1975 she married Senator Bob Dole and campaigned with him when he was nominated for vice president in 1976.

In all these jobs she was a hard-working perfectionist with no sharp ideological edge. She always maintained her gracious Southern manners and showed an enthusiasm and friendliness that was off-putting to some but which served her well in a series of positions that few or no women had held. In 1981 she headed Ronald Reagan's Public Liaison office and in 1983 she was appointed Secretary of Transportation; in that capacity, she likes to point out, she was the first woman to head a branch of the armed services, the Coast Guard. In 1989 George H. W. Bush appointed her Secretary of Labor. In 1991 she became head of the American Red Cross, which had grave organizational problems and whose blood bank program was in trouble. She restructured the organization and put in place new blood bank procedures. She took a leave of absence to work on her husband's presidential campaign from November 1995 to January 1997; many will remember her speech about her husband at the San Diego convention, in which she walked about and spoke fluently and fervently. In 1999 she resigned from the Red Cross to run for president. She placed third in the August 1999 Iowa straw poll, but dropped out of the race in October. She did not endorse George W. Bush at that point and did not take a job in the Bush administration.

In early 2001 it was not clear whether North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms would run for reelection. White House political strategists were already looking at Dole as a possible candidate; in August 2001 Helms announced his retirement. Dole moved back to her mother's house in Salisbury and registered to vote. She started out with very high ratings from the public. But some Republican insiders worried that Dole would be a brittle candidate. Her perfectionism and insistence on tight control of every public event would keep her distant to the voters, they feared, and a campaign based on her Washington resume would seem out of touch with North Carolina voters.

Dole did not make these mistakes. Instead she made two very shrewd decisions. One was to conduct a tour of all of North Carolina's 100 counties. Everywhere she drew crowds, not just in the big metro areas but also in small towns--175 in Hendersonville, 120 in Mars Hill, 200 in Asheville. People mobbed her, asked for autographs, and clicked photos of her. Sometimes they also noticed Bob Dole, traveling with her over back roads. She said that she had a religious renewal in the early 1980s and that her religious faith was the center of her life and that she hoped that September 11 would cause a "spiritual renewal." In November 2001, former Charlotte Mayor Richard Vinroot dropped out of the race; her other primary competitors were little-known and attracted little attention or support. When they questioned her conservatism, she said, "Just to set the record straight, in case there is any misunderstanding, I am pro-life and I am a strong supporter of the Second Amendment of the Constitution, protecting the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens." In February 2002 Helms endorsed her. Their connections went back a long way: Helms had been a friend of her mother since his first campaign in 1972; Bob Dole had asked for Helms to vouch for him with her when he was wooing her daughter.

Dole's other wise decision was to develop a set of specific stands on issues and distribute them as the "Dole Plan." She set out a detailed plan for individual investment accounts in Social Security. On taxes she called for higher depreciation, more flexibility for Medical Savings Accounts and permanent repeal of the estate tax. On gun control she switched her positions from her 1999 campaign, this time opposing background checks on individuals' sales of guns at gun shows and a ban on assault weapons. Tobacco and textiles have long been political issues in North Carolina: Dole presented a plan for buying out tobacco quotas and called for electronic labeling of U.S.-manufactured cloth to enable duties to be laid on imports of cloth falsely labeled Made in U.S.A.

But she favored trade promotion authority, which was opposed by all the other three Republicans and six Democrats running for the seat. It was widely believed that North Carolina had lost many textile jobs since NAFTA went into effect in 1995. Secretary of State Elaine Marshall, the first candidate in the race, strongly criticized NAFTA and opposed trade promotion authority. So did state Representative Dan Blue, who had been the first black Speaker of North Carolina's House. And so did former White House Chief of Staff Erskine Bowles. Though he had supported NAFTA and had lobbied Congress to give Bill Clinton trade promotion authority, he opposed it now.

Bowles was an investment banker from a prominent family. His father, Hargrove "Skipper" Bowles was the Democratic nominee for governor in 1972 who lost in a Republican year but was still remembered fondly. His wife, Crandall Close, was CEO of Springs Industries, a large textile firm started by her family. Bowles, as Clinton's chief of staff, negotiated the 1997 budget package that led to a balanced budget; he had been trusted by Republican leaders when they seethed with mistrust of Clinton. But it didn't help Bowles that Blue and Marshall continued to hammer him on trade and that, because of a lawsuit against the Democratic legislature's state legislative redistricting plans, the primary was delayed from May to September 10.

Dole won the Republican primary with 80% of the vote; Bowles won the Democratic primary with 43% of the vote, to 29% for Blue and 15% for Marshall. This was a heavy-spending race. Dole raised and spent $13.7 million, Bowles spent nearly as much; he put in $2.9 million of his money before October 15 and then another $3.6 million. Some of the ads got personal. A Dole ad criticized Bowles's wife for laying off workers in North Carolina and creating new jobs in Mexico and China; Bowles responded in an angry face-on ad and ran an ad showing racecar driver Junior Johnson saying he wouldn't let the Republicans "run Erskine Bowles into the wall." One debate was videotaped behind locked doors in accordance with the candidates' demands. Bowles attacked Dole on trade and Social Security. She stood her ground on both issues, arguing for free trade and promoting her Dole plan for Social Security: she would hold up papers with her plan written out and then say she would show Bowles's plan--and hold up a blank sheet of paper. Bowles attacked Dole for opposing Clinton's family leave law when she was Secretary of Labor and for opposing a 1990 civil rights law; she replied that she thought the family leave measure had worked out all right and the civil rights bill was a quota bill. Dole ads often mentioned Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton; Bowles's ads avoided mentions of the Clintons. The late surge of Bowles's spending enabled him to close the gap in the polls, but this seems mostly to have been a matter of the coalescence of the usual party constituencies.

Dole won 54%-45%, just shy of Bush's 56%-43% lead in 2000. She carried two of the three big metro areas by wide margins--Charlotte (57%-42%) and Greensboro-Winston Salem--and finished just behind Bowles in Raleigh-Durham (49%-50%), where the Democratic margins in Durham and Chapel Hill are balanced by the Republican margins in much faster-growing areas in Wake County like Cary. In the other half of the state, Dole led 54%-46%. West of Raleigh-Durham, Dole carried all but a few mountain and sand hill counties. She carried the central part of eastern North Carolina but lost in heavily black counties to the north and south.

Dole started off quietly in the Senate, as Hillary Rodham Clinton had two years before; she turned down requests to appear on television shows and instead traveled around North Carolina to places like Flat Rock (pop. 1,690) and Winterville (4,791). "I think being the new senator from North Carolina, it's important to put North Carolina first for a while." She accepted Barbara Mikulski's gracious offer to give up her desk, which had been Bob Dole's. She got seats on Armed Services, Banking and Agriculture: "I chose the committees that would be most beneficial to North Carolina." Her first bill was to give full federal recognition to the Lumbee Indians, recognized as a tribe by the state in 1885 and by Congress in 1956, but denied tribal benefits. This was opposed by those who feared the Lumbees would build a casino off Interstate 95--Republican Congressman Walter Jones, the North Carolina Family Council, the Eastern Band of Cherokees who have their own casino in East Tennessee. Dole's bill passed the Indian Affairs Committee, but was kept off the floor by parliamentary maneuvers. Dole's maiden speech, in June 2003, was on hunger in America; she called for a public-private partnership to encourage gleaning, with tax deductions to farmers and businesses that donate food; she held up North Carolina's Society of St. Andrews as an example.

On broader national issues, she had a conservative voting record and generally supported the Bush administration. She was the only woman senator to vote against a resolution declaring Roe v. Wade "appropriate." She did disagree with the administration on media ownership rules, the Singapore Free Trade Agreement and on whether to conduct an inventory of oil and gas reserves off the Outer Banks. With Chuck Hagel and John Sununu, she sponsored a bill to set up a new regulatory authority for the Government Sponsored Enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Unlike the current Office of Federal Housing Enterprise Oversight, it would have authority to determine the GSEs' missions and to close down failing GSEs; it could raise capital standards and regulate the type and amount of non-mission assets; the new agency would be funded by assessments on the GSEs rather than appropriations. This measure did not go to the floor, but the subject became more prominent when OFHEO in September 2004 issued a report concluding that Fannie Mae overstated risk-based capital by $20 billion and minimum capital by $3 billion. Fannie Mae CEO Franklin Raines was forced to resign in December. In early 2005 the questions seemed to be whether a new regulatory commission would be established, as Dole's bill provided, or whether the GSEs should be privatized altogether.

Dole's other big issue was one more prominent in North Carolina: the tobacco buyout. In 2003 she cosponsored a bill to end the 1938 tobacco quota system and to spend $10.1 billion over 10 years to buy out quota-holders and tobacco farmers. She argued that tobacco quotas were being reduced sharply and stood to be reduced even more, and that the cost of renting quotas (many quota holders treat them as an investment) raised the U.S. price of tobacco above the world price. It was widely believed that the buyout could succeed only if it was tied to giving the FDA regulatory power over tobacco, a position taken by the largest tobacco company, Altria, but opposed by the others. Dole tried to put the buyout without FDA regulation on the November 2003 omnibus, but failed. Political pressure built as Democrats seemed more favorable to the buyout than Republicans: John Kerry endorsed the buyout while George W. Bush in May 2004 said there should be no changes in tobacco law; Erskine Bowles, running for the Senate again, attacked his opponent Congressman Richard Burr for not doing enough to get a buyout. In October the buyout, without FDA regulation, was attached to the corporate tax bill; House Ways and Means Chairman Bill Thomas saw it as a way to attract 13 southern Democrats. In the Senate Dole overcame opposition from those who sought FDA regulation, and the buyout was included in the corporate tax bill signed by Bush.

On other North Carolina issues, Dole weighed in against EPA approval of a wood treatment which, she said, would cost North Carolina jobs (though Bob Dole was lobbying for the other side) and hailed the International Trade Commission decision in December 2004 to uphold tariffs on government-subsidized furniture from China. She got funding for textile tracers, detection devices to prevent illegal textile imports. She got Armed Services Chairman John Warner to co-sign a letter urging the Navy to determine where F-18A Hornets should be based--the competing bases were in North Carolina and Warner's Virginia--without regard to political considerations.

Despite her quiet start in the Senate, Dole called Secretary of State Colin Powell and offered to go to Iran on a humanitarian mission after the Bam earthquake in December 2003. The Iranians rejected the offer in January. And Dole put her fundraising skills to work for her fellow Republicans, working with NRSC Chairman George Allen to raise $2,000 maximum contributions. She traveled extensively for Republican candidates in fall 2004 and that year her leadership PAC raised $686,000. In November she ran against Norm Coleman to be the new NRSC chairman. Coleman argued that there were too many southerners in the leadership and cited his own extensive campaigning efforts. Allen supported Dole; both claimed a majority of the votes. Dole won 28-27.

Committees

• Aging (Special).
• Armed Services: Airland; Emerging Threats & Capabilities; Personnel.
• Banking, Housing & Urban Affairs: Housing & Transportation; International Trade & Finance; Securities & Investment.

Group Ratings (More Info)
	ADA	ACLU	AFS	LCV	ITIC	NTU	COC	ACU	NTLC	CHC
2004	25	11	33	0	92	64	100	92	88	100	--
2003	15	--	11	11	--	72	91	80	--	--	--

National Journal Ratings (More Info)
	2003 LIB	--	2003 CONS		2004 LIB	--	2004 CONS
Economic	29%	--	68%		39%	--	58%
Social	0%	--	59%		16%	--	81%
Foreign	32%	--	65%		0%	--	67%
For National Journal's complete 2004 Vote Ratings, as well as previous ratings dating back to 1995, please click here.

Key Votes Of The 108th Congress (More Info)
1. Ban Drilling in ANWR N 2. Approve Bush Tax Cuts Y 3. Medicare/Rx Bill Y 4. Bar Overtime Pay Regs. N 5. Energy Bill Y 6. Support Roe v. Wade N		7. Ban Partial-Birth Abortion Y  8. Assault Weapons Ban N  9. Ban Same-Sex Marriage Y 10. Ban Bunker-Buster Bomb N 11. Fund Iraq War Y 12. Restrict Missile Defense N

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent	Expenditures
2002 general	Elizabeth Dole (R)	1,248,664	54%	$13,735,220
	Erskine Bowles (D)	1,047,983	45%	$13,306,317
	Other	34,534	1%
2002 primary	Elizabeth Dole (R)	342,631	80%
	Jim Snyder (R)	60,477	14%
	Other	22,998	5%
1996 general	Jesse Helms (R)	1,345,833	53%	$14,589,266
	Harvey B. Gantt (D)	1,173,875	46%	$7,992,980