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Granny D Haddock, 94, Gets Help With Her U.S. Senate Campaign

Aug. 4, 2004 - Doris "Granny D" Haddock, 94 years young and great-grandmother of 16, received a big boost to her campaign to become a U.S. Senator from New Hampshire, when Joe Trippi – the former Howard Dean campaign manager – agreed to become her principal campaign strategist.

Her Website - http://www.grannyd.com/ Her announcement speech - Click Here

Trippi won acclaim for his use of the Internet to promote Dean and raise campaign funds. The first item on his agenda at the Granny D campaign is to redesign the Website - www.grannyd.com.

Haddock attracted national attention in 1998, when she walked across the country to promote campaign finance reform.

She is considered a massive underdog in her effort to unseat Republican Judd Gregg.

The race is expected to get a lot closer, however, with the addition of Trippi, who has worked on Presidential campaigns for Edward Kenney, Walter Mondale, Gary Hart and Dick Gephardt.

 “The message is going to change,” Dennis Burke, the campaign’s operations manager told the Associated Press. The campaign’s focus will shift to promote Haddock as an alternative to career politicians.

Trippi, who is a volunteer, has recently been on a media tour promoting his book, “The Revolution will not be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything.”

Haddock will be joined by Trippi on Thursday as she begins a walk of 200 miles through New Hampshire, along the route of the old Portsmouth Post Road. The trip is planned for her to walk five miles each morning and spend the rest of the day campaigning

Another Haddock walk that drew national attention was around the Capitol for a week during the debate of the McCain-Feingold campaign finance bill. Since then she has made trips around the country in a multicolored camper, registering women and minorities to vote.

Biography of Doris "Granny D" Haddock

• Born Jan. 24, 1910 in Laconia, New Hampshire; Widow, two grown children, sixteen great grandchildren.
• Attended Emerson College in Boston for 3 years. Left upon marriage to James Haddock, an Amherst graduate. Emerson awarded her an honorary degree in 2000.
• With her husband, Jim, she helped stop the planned use of hydrogen bombs in Alaska in 1960, saving an Inuit fishing village at Point Hope.
• After the defeat of Senator McCain and Senator Feingold's first attempt to remove unregulated "soft" money from campaigns in 1995, she became interested in campaign reform and led a petition movement.
• In 1998, she decided to walk across the U.S. to demonstrate her concern for the issue of campaign reform. She walked around her hometown of Dublin, New Hampshire for most of 1998 to get in shape for the walk.
• On Jan. 1, 1999, at the age of 89, she began her walk in Pasadena, California. She walked 10 miles per day for 14 months, arriving in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 29, 2000. She was hospitalized once, in Arizona, with dehydration and pneumonia. She walked 3,200 miles.
• Her route: Pasadena to Twentynine Palms CA, Parker AZ, Wickenburg, Phoenix, Tucson, Tombstone, Lordsburg NM, Las Cruces, El Paso TX, Midland, Dallas, Texarkana AK, Little Rock, Memphis TN, Louisville KY, Cincinnati OH, Parkersburg WV, Morgantown, Cumberland MD, Washington, D.C. Her hardest miles were climbing the Appalachian Range during blizzard conditions. When snows between Cumberland, Maryland and Washington threatened to delay her arrival in February of 2000, she cross-country skied 100 miles along the old C&O Canal tow path (she is a lifelong skier.)
• She made speeches along her walk, and made an effort to draw reform groups together. When she arrived in Washington, she was met by 2,200 people, representing a wide variety of reform groups. Several dozen Members of Congress walked the final miles with her.
• Pro-reform Capitol Hill staffers and elected officials credit her with demonstrating that Americans care about campaign finance reform. She connected the issue with patriotic values in a way that provided wider popular support for reform. She was instrumental in moving the issue forward. When presidential candidate Al Gore adopted a campaign finance reform plank, his speech credited John McCain, Bill Bradley, and Doris Haddock.
• After completing the walk, she wrote "Granny D: You're Never Too Old to Raise a Little Hell," which is published by Random House and is required reading in several US colleges and universities.
• In October of 2003, she launched a voter registration effort directed at America's working women. She did so with a speech at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. She traveled over 22,000 miles, returning home in June, 2004 in time to run for the U.S. Senate when the presumed Democratic nominee dropped out of the race days before the filing deadline, leaving the incumbent unopposed.