Doris Haddock, known on the road as "Granny D", walked across the United States to collect signatures for her petition for national campaign finance reform.

Haddock, who was born January 24, 1910, walked 10 miles per day from Los Angeles to Washington, DC. She turned 90 near the end of her trip.

She urged the media, who were glad to cover an oddball story of a woman demanding that politicians stop being corrupt, to create political Web sites. She told the American Society of Newspaper Editors:

If a candidate for office wants to share a 5,000-page report on tax reform, the report does not have to compete for space in the newspaper or even on the newspaper's website. A click on one word on the newspaper's website can take the reader into the full document on the candidate's website. That is new; that has wonderful possibilities for making campaigns affordable, and it must be creatively developed.

If I were the publisher of a newspaper with a website, I would work to make the newspaper's website a very interesting political meeting ground where ideas and candidates would spar, and I would push the website out to the public with good and constant promotion. In that environment, it might someday be possible for candidates to reach the public with their debates, their issues, their résumés, and their lies even, without the necessity of spending tremendous amounts of money.

Her own website is, of course, at grannyd.com. She answers e-mail messages with grace and style. Sample reply to someone who called her a leftist: "Dear Sir, Thank you for taking time to write to me. Yesterday I was indeed a leftist, but this morning I was a rightist, because the traffic was safer there. Tomorrow, we'll see."

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