Dudley Not Redundant for Shea-Porter

[Ron Burgundy]

CQPolitics.com - Residents of New Hampshire’s 1st Congressional District may soon be seeing double, now that the 110th Congress has been sworn in. The district’s newly minted freshman representative, Democrat Carol Shea-Porter (news, bio, voting record), has chosen a district director with the memorably redundant name of Dudley Dudley.

Dudley’s first name was inherited from her grandmother’s maiden name, and she later married a man whose last name is Dudley, according to the Associated Press.

Shea-Porter, a social worker who scored a major upset last November over two-term Republican Rep. Jeb Bradley, has a reputation as a fervent liberal activist from her efforts on numerous causes, including opposition to the war in Iraq. And her hiring of Dudley will hardly diminish that persona.

Dudley during the 1970s gained a national reputation as a grass-roots activist. This stemmed in part from her leadership, while serving in the state House, of a successful challenge to Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis’ effort to build an oil refinery near New Hampshire’s coastline, and her opposition to a controversial nuclear power plant project in Seabrook, N.H.

Dudley led the charge in New Hampshire for Massachusetts Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s ultimately unsuccessful challenge to President Jimmy Carter for the 1980 Democratic presidential nomination.

Dudley gave congressional politics a whirl herself in 1984, running for the same House seat that Shea-Porter would win 22 years later. Running for the 1st District seat left open by Democrat Norman E. D’Amours, Dudley outran two primary opponents to win the nomination to take on Republican Robert C. Smith.

Dudley’s slogan made a play on her name: “Dudley Dudley, Worth Repeating.”

But that boomeranged when Smith — a staunch conservative who would serve three House terms (1985-90) and two in the Senate (1990-2003) — coined his own catchphrase: “Dudley Dudley, Liberal Liberal.”

Benefitting from a general Republican lean in the 1st and President Ronald Reagan’s landslide margin in his re-election bid, Smith trounced Dudley by nearly 20 percentage points.

According to the Portsmouth Herald, Dudley and Shea-Porter worked together on Wesley Clark’s run for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination; Dudley helped out this year with fundraising for Shea-Porter’s upstart campaign.

With her 51 percent to 49 percent win over Bradley, Shea-Porter gained the distinction that Dudley had sought more than two decades earlier: She is the first woman from New Hampshire elected to Congress.