Last Thanksgiving Porter Hardy Jr., a retired Congressman from Portsmouth, Va., bluntly told his daughter, Lynn H. Yeakel: “This ain’t no time to be in Washington.”
But Ms. Yeakel, a 50-year-old fund-raiser for women’s charities, also listened to other advisers. Like her, they were outraged by the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings on Judge Clarence Thomas’s nomination for the Supreme Court, and they were also confident that it was the right year to shake up that most exclusive of men’s clubs, the United States Senate.
“If it hadn’t been for those hearings,” Ms. Yeakel (pronounced YAY-kul) said in an interview Monday, “it never would have occurred to me to run against Arlen Specter. He’s a frightening adversary.”
On Feb. 6 she began campaigning in the Democratic primary contest for a chance to challenge Mr. Specter, the state’s two-term Republican Senator. Her candidacy was summed up in newspaper headlines like one in The Philadelphia Inquirer on March 13: “Unknown, Inexperienced — and Sure She Can Win.”
Political analysts say Ms. Yeakel ran a flawless campaign, quickly establishing herself with a television advertisement that seemed to capture the mood of voter disgust with Washington. The commercial uses a segment of the televised hearings in which Mr. Specter, a former Philadelphia district attorney, questions Prof. Anita F. Hill of the University of Oklahoma about her sexual-harassment accusations against Judge Thomas. Ms. Yeakel then appears on screen and asks, “Did this make you as angry as it made me?”
Today, many voters apparently said yes, it did.
Ms. Yeakel says those hearings were a landmark in advancing the political candidacies of women, and she said it most forcefully in a recent interview on WHYY-FM public radio in Philadelphia.
“I believe that the backlash from those hearings is somewhat stronger than anyone has documented yet,” she said, “and that in history we’re going to see the Hill-Thomas hearings as being the turning point for American women in terms of really stepping forward, taking political power, using the vote, using our money to elect the candidates who represent our values and stand for our rights.”
But Ms. Yeakel, who is trying to avoid being cast as a single-issue candidate, emphasizes that women’s issues are everybody’s issues. “I am running as a champion of women’s issues, which are issues that are central in this society and include child care, pay equity, housing, education, jobs and the economy,” she said Monday.
Lynn Hardy Yeakel was born July 9, 1941, in Portsmouth to Lynn Moore, a school teacher from Tennessee, and Porter Hardy Jr. Her younger brother, Porter Hardy 3d, died in a car accident in 1986.
Although she waited 50 years to run for public office, she has a personal knowledge of politics and Washington. She was 5 years old when her father began serving his first of 11 terms in the House, and she went to school in Alexandria, Va., with some of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s grandchildren.
Her father once took her to hear Harry S. Truman’s State of the Union Message. She also remembers meeting Queen Elizabeth at a British Embassy party, dancing with President John F. Kennedy at the White House and having Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson pick up a pack of cigarettes that she had dropped at that party.