A New Face On The Hill

When Carol Shea-Porter, a freshman congresswoman from New Hampshire, moved into her Capitol Hill office on Wednesday, 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 even run, including herself, CBS News correspondent Richard Schlesinger reports.

She never saw herself as a candidate?

"No, not at all," she says. "It just wasn't in the game plan."

Shea-Porter was a high school political science teacher and a social worker who was 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 says.

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 21 points, what do you think?'" she says. "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 Shea-Porter campaigned with a home-video camera and an unlikely crew. She hired Susan Mayer as campaign manager — an interesting choice since Mayer is a medieval historian.

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

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 won; she got less than 52 percent of the vote — enough to claim the office for the next two years.

Almost 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.