By Stowell P. Watters
Staff Writer
    Kennebunkport resident Laurie Dobson (Independent Democrat) recently announced that she is running for Sen. Susan Collin’s seat on the Senate in 2008. Her campaign symbol, she said, is a blue lobster.
    “The lobster is a symbol of Maine, where I am from, where I always knew I would end up,” she said.
    Dobson has an extensive family history in the town and surrounding areas, according to a lineage book she keeps at her Kennebunkport home. The book displays the original pew owners within the First Church in Cape Porpoise. Among the owners is her great great great grandfather, Amos Hutchins.
    According to Dobson, her grandfather, George Goodrich, was a Cape Porpoise lobsterman of local legend.
    “The story goes that George could shoot a nickel out of the air with a rifle, and that he even pulled a William Tell, shooting the apple off of a friend’s head,” she said.
    Her grandmother Sadie owned Sadie’s Swimming Lobsters, a now closed lobster shack on Mills Road.
    While Dobson didn’t grow up in Maine, she was born here and decided to settle down here with her husband Michael and her daughter Emma. Her other children, son Jesse and daughter Lily, have moved out of the house.
    The family lives on a 200 year-old dairy farm which the couple, who share an interest in landscaping, have fixed up to the point of personal perfection. For Dobson’s last birthday her husband built a macadam patio complete with a bubbling waterfall, a serene pool and simpering frogs. This is a lot of work considering Michael’s ongoing battle with cancer, she said.
    “A year ago this October we found a brain tumor growing in Michael, he has since been through a lot of chemotherapy, and it has been a tremendous battle for him and for our family,” she said.     
    Currently Michael is on a comprehensive supplemental health regiment, an approach that strengthens the body’s ability to fight the cancer. However, he still undergoes maintenance chemotherapy.
    Dobson’s sister Lisa passed away 11 years ago after what Laurie calls “a horrible, long battle with leukemia.”
    “The root of my passion for people’s rights comes from my personal battles, it has been a hard time, but we are pushing on, my husband and I fight this thing together every day, and it empowers us,” she said.
    Dobson’s Maine roots are not the only reason she chose the blue lobster to represent her campaign.
    “I will speak until I am blue in the face,” she said. “The lobster and I are both a rarity.”
    To this affect, Dobson illustrated her campaign platform. Unlike any other Senate candidate to her knowledge, Dobson is running a pro-impeachment, anti-war campaign. She is emphatically clear about her disgust of the current administration, and even Maine Congressman Tom Allen (D).
    “Tom Allen is regarded as the anti-war champion in current politics, yet he signs bills that provide war funding,” she said, lowering her glance and clasping her hands. “Tom Allen is a coward.”
    Dobson speaks about war and our country’s current treatment of veterans as if they were problems in her personal life. She does not hold back.
    “There are impeachable offenses that have been committed, including a direct violation of the 1862 War Profiteering Act,” she said. “Our country feels rotten at the core, and the only way to end this is to impeach the current administration, restore constitutional law, repeal the Patriot Act and end the erosion of civil liberties.”
    Another leg of her campaign focuses on an immediate national health care program that she views as a necessity for those who have fought for the country. She said too many veterans have to go though an extensive waiting period before they receive the money they need to get well.
    “When we stop spending a trillion dollars a year for perpetual war with the rest of the world, we will have the means to pay for universal health care, and doing this is my pledge,” she wrote on her Web site and blog (http://lauriedobson.blogspot.com).
    In the Senate she would also push for a nationwide civil program that would give high school graduates an option besides college or the army, one that would put them to work throughout America reconstructing buildings, rebuilding those areas affected by Katrina and performing other acts of civil labor for the betterment of the country.
    Dobson likens her idea to the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), a project that president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the Democratic party during the Great Depression to end to the rampant unemployment and economic chaos that ravaged America. The CCC created jobs for thousands of people in America, enlisting young people to partake in civil projects throughout the country, according to the CCC alumni Web site.
    “Our country has no plan to end the war and  no plan to address the problems we will face after the war,” Dobson said.
    She is also concerned about our country’s dependence on oil and wants to reinvest in rail.
    “We need to use the largely abandoned railways in our country, we need a mass transit system for the middle, working class people of America that cuts traffic and cuts oil consumption,” she said. “Oil will be gone in the blink of an eye, and that is a serious concern that is not being seriously dealt with.”
    Dobson’s father was in the US Air force, and as a result she spent her youth on the airbase in Connecticut.
    “I come from a military family, this is my way of fighting,” she said.
    From these beginnings she grew up to become a community activist and even ran to become a Connecticut State Representative. She also worked on John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign.
    Dobson herself was a hot topic this summer when she was removed from the Kennebunkport Growth Planning Committee (GPC), an immensely publicized and controversial issue that actually drew investigation from the state’s Attorney General Steven Rowe. She was removed based on her failure to perform the duties of office and incompetence due to lack of the qualities necessary for effective conduct within the committee structure, according to Kennebunkport public record.
    “I spoke for the people as I do now, the GPC and the planning board wanted to develop more land in my town, they wanted to do things that I found suspect concerning changes in land use, I wanted more community involvement in the comprehensive plan,” she said.
    Following the decision in June, Dobson was named “Democrat of the Month” by Dem Corps, a non-profit social welfare organization formed in 2006.
    “Citizens like Laurie Dobson are what democracy is all about, if a citizen cannot run for the highest office in the land then there is a huge problem in this country,” said Glen MacWilliams, secretary of the Dem Corps organization. He went on to call Dobson a role-model for concerned citizens.
    Through all of this publicity and her job as a full-time caregiver to her husband, Dobson is stalwart on her political position.
    “I have never been bought, I have never said anything that anyone has told me to say, and I will continue to clamor for these things so there will be a better future for my children, and their children,” she said. “I refuse to compromise. Our state and our country need to have real dialogue concerning war funding and our perpetual war-policy, we need leaders with backbone.”
    Her passion for these matters is made immediately clear by her willingness to speak at length. She runs in 2008 as an Independent Democrat, a Mainer, a mother, a wife and an activist. To this end she offered her favorite quote, said by the American philosopher Buckminster Fuller.
    “The things to do are: the things that need doing, that you see need to be done, and that no one else seems to see need to be done.”
    Dobson urges anyone who is interested in her campaign or that would like to voice their concerns regarding the state of the nation to visit her aforementioned Web site.