Can you send someone "back" to a place they never lived?
On Wednesday in western North Carolina, folks supporting Democrat Kay Hagan's campaign for U.S. Senate planned to gather and decorate ruby red slippers for GOP Sen. Elizabeth Dole, urging the incumbent to return to Kansas.
Except Dole has never lived in Kansas.
If anything, she's more of a D.C. gal, working in Washington most of her career and living primarily in the Watergate Apartment building since marrying then-Sen. Bob Dole in 1975, Barb Barrett reports.
Mr. Dole, of course, IS from Kansas.
The small town of Russell figures prominently in his biography. But he had already been elected to the Senate when he met the former Miss Hanford on Capitol Hill.
Hagan's ruby slipper joke — an allusion to her common refrain that she’d like to get Elizabeth Dole back home Dorothy-style — was pretty funny to folks in the Sunflower State and its environs on Thursday.
More after the jump.
—————
The Kansas City Star, the Topeka Capital-Journal, the Lawrence Journal World and the Wichita Eagle all featured an Associated Press story about the red slippers.
Some of the reader commenters on the papers' websites figured North Carolinians are just ticked off that Kansas University knocked off the Tar Heels last March in the NCAA basketball tournament.
Anyway, Hagan spokeswoman Colleen Flanagan said the slippers aren't so much a joke about the state of Kansas as a move by Hagan’s supporters to highlight their view that Dole hasn't done enough for North Carolina.
She said other supporters will hold more slipper-decorating parties around the state.
And, Flanagan pointed out, while Dole might not have lived in Kansas, she was registered to vote there for 25 years.
An elections officer in Russell County, Kan., confirmed that Dole was a registered Republican from September 1976 until August 2001, when she switched her registration to North Carolina.
Dole campaign spokesman Hogan Gidley thought Hagan was making fun of Bob Dole.
"Senator Elizabeth Dole will continue to focus on the issues important to North Carolinians while her opponent attacks a man who has served his country honorably," he said in a statement.
Blog RSS feed
Re: Kansans chuckle at Hagan's slippers
Wow...I mean, I'm trying to figure out what mental hoops and turns you have to take to find the Hagan comment an insult against Bob Dole. Those campaign staffers must just live in a whole 'nother world, where everyone is out to get them, and evil lurks in every shadow..