Elizabeth Dole comes off as a charming, eloquent Southern woman working hard to be the next senator for North Carolina. As the campaign to replace the retiring Jesse Helms gets underway, though, perhaps the most interesting aspect of the race will be to see whether “Liddy” can maintain that kind of veneer in what promises to be a rough and tumble race.

Dole’s whirlwind tour through Western North Carolina last week was the first chance a lot of Tar Heels had to meet the woman who has spent nearly all of her adult life — the last 40 years — outside her home state. Around this area, she was greeted warmly by overflowing crowds at each stop.

And it’s no wonder. Dole, 65, is as close to celebrity as a politician who has never held elected office can get. The Democrat-turned-Republican has twice been a Cabinet secretary, has been president of the American Red Cross, ran for president in 2000, and is married to 1996 GOP presidential candidate Sen. Bob Dole. She has national connections, and she was only half-joking at campaign stops last week when she said that she knows Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Colin Powell, and “they’ll return my calls.”

That kind of immediate clout is something voters like, and the thought of Dole successfully working the inner corridors of Washington will reassure a lot of conservative voters who fear the loss of the outspoken and powerful Helms.

But Dole’s matronly personality is already under attack, both from within her own party and from outside.

On Dec. 26, Dole bought the Salisbury house where she was raised and where her 100-year-old mother lives. Prior to that, Dole did not own a residence in the state she wants to represent in the U.S. Senate. Only last year did she change her voter registration from her husband’s home state of Kansas back to North Carolina. That opportunistic registration came just in time to run for Helms’ seat, and it has drawn some criticism.

“Of course, they tried to pass her off as another Hillary,” Chester Crisp of Graham County told a New York Times reporter. “But she’s not. She’s a native North Carolinian, so she’s our own flesh and blood.”

And though most political observers predict Dole will run away with the GOP nomination, she does have challengers. Lexington lawyer Jim Snyder is among them. He is rich and will likely spend some of his own money to contest Dole. His chosen line of attack may be to question her conservative credentials.

During her presidential primary run, Dole opposed concealed gun laws and supported a ban on assault weapons. Since then, she has gone on record as opposing “restrictions on the ownership of firearms that penalize the law-abiding citizen” and said the assault weapons ban should not be expanded or extended. Some would call that a flip-flop.

Snyder is also questioning what he calls Dole’s shifting stand on abortion.

“The folks out there are concerned about the trust issue. The Second Amendment and abortion are sacrosanct to conservatives, and they just don’t waver on those,” Snyder told a reporter.

But Snyder is on the outside, and his challenge will almost certainly go away after May. The Democrats lining up to challenge Dole will get a lot tougher. Erskine Bowles, a former deputy chief of staff for Bill Clinton whose dad was a North Carolina governor, has national fund-raising credentials. State Rep. Dan Blue of Wake County and Secretary of State Elaine Marshall are also battling for the Democratic nomination.

The seat, though, appears to be Dole’s to lose. The idea of a successful North Carolinian returning home triumphantly to run for public office is nothing like Hillary Clinton’s taking up residence in New York just so she could run for that Senate seat. Dole was raised in Salisbury, attended Duke, and even spent time during summers growing up at Lake Junaluska. Sure she’s been gone, but the carpetbagger accusations aren’t going to stick. Her opponents would be smarter to label her as a Washington insider, something we are sure to hear in the coming months.

Her current tour through the state’s 100 counties is reacquainting her with old friends, and her speeches are more fluff than issue-oriented. Soon she will have to begin laying out her stand on the important issues facing North Carolinians. Jobs, worker training, air pollution, and our changing agricultural and manufacturing economies are big issues facing a state that is undergoing a fiscal crisis. She has already claimed national defense as among the most important issues facing the country, and that will play well in a state that hosts some of the country’s most important military installations.

Dole’s celebrity status might win her a few votes, but what we really need is someone who will fight to help the people of this state. Having been a legal resident of the state for just over a year, she’s got a lot of work to do between now and November.

(Scott McLeod can be reached at info@smokymountainnews.com)