New Face On The Hill

When Carol Shea Porter, the freshman congresswoman from New Hampshire, moved into her Capitol Hill office yesterday, it was a sign of the times.

"Waited a while to see that," she said. "That looks very, very nice."

It's not just that nobody expected her to win, nobody expected her to run, including herself, CBS News correspondent Richard Schlesinger reports.

She never saw herself as a candidate?

"No, not at all," she said. "Well, it just wasn't in the game plan."

She was a high school political science teacher and a social worker. Politically active but never a candidate herself — until she went to volunteer on the gulf coast after Hurricane Katrina.

"I wondered, 'where are the helpers? Where's the federal money? And is anybody coming to help these people?'" she said.

She took on a two-term Republican incumbent in a year when republicans were dropping like flies.

"We'd get an interview now and again and the interviewer would say something like, 'You're down twenty one points, what do you think?'" she said. "I would look up and say, 'I think we're going to win,' and I'd see this pity on the reporter's face.

The Democratic Party wrote off her race as hopeless. So Carol Shea Porter campaigned with an unlikely crew. She hired Susan Mayer as campaign manager — Interesting choice since Mayer's a medieval historian.

"And I said 'I never ran a campaign before' and she said 'Well, I never ran for office before," Mayer said. "Perfect match."

They scrounged wherever they could for voters and endorsements.

Carol's mom appeared in one campaign commercial, "Please vote for my daughter, Carol Shea Porter."

And she eked it out not by much, just 52 percent of the vote. But it was enough to claim this office for the next two years.

Everyone was surprised.

Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean couldn't even remember her name the day after she won — adding insult to victory.

"Anyone remember who I'm talking about?" Dean said. "The first district of New Hampshire? I can't think of the last part of the hyphenated name. But anyway … Carol."

She may still be one face in a crowd, but at least the right people know her name today.