Chicago ? She travels alone a lot.

Sometimes she’s just with Robert James, a retired semi driver who became her volunteer driver. He’s behind the wheel of his Lincoln Navigator. Carol Moseley Braun, presidential candidate, rides shotgun.

When she flies, there’s no private plane. When she goes through airport security, she says: “I’m always a selectee. For search … I’m standing there with no shoes on, making butterfly wings with my arms.”

Braun has no staff in Iowa, no staff in New Hampshire. Walk through her home neighborhood of Hyde Park here, the place that launched her into politics 25 years ago, that proudly claimed her when she was a U.S. senator, and there’s not one “Carol for President” sign in a window.

“Stuff,” she said. “There’s different theories about stuff. Stuff is not my priority right now. You want stuff, you have to have an apparatus for stuff, to get it redistributed and redistributed.”

There would have to be volunteers to pass out stuff, and there aren’t many of them. There’s not much money, either — only about $125,000 raised in the third quarter, and about the same amount of debt. And there’s only “maybe eight or 10” paid staff members.

Braun goes to every Democratic Party debate, though, getting her laugh lines and frequent applause. “People often ask, ‘What makes you different? Why should you be elected …’ ” she said, pausing, as she addressed a huge hotel ballroom full of black community advocates on a recent Saturday, ” ‘… instead of George Bush?’ ” She waits for the whooping and hollering she knows will greet the comparison.

“I don’t look like him, I don’t think like him, I don’t act like him, and I’m not going to be like him,” she said.

Low polls

Polls in Iowa and New Hampshire, where the first voters will make their choice, show Braun barely registering. A recent Newsweek poll of Democratic voters nationwide had her tied with Sen. John Kerry for fifth place, at 7 percent, ahead of Sen. John Edwards, Rep. Dennis Kucinich and the Rev. Al Sharpton.

Braun points out that her “resume is more impressive” than those of many of the men running. She has been an assistant U.S. attorney who specialized in civil litigation on health care and the environment and immigration, Cook County recorder of deeds, a longtime state legislator in Illinois before her 1992 election to the Senate, and a member of the diplomatic corps, appointed in 1999.

‘The nasties’

If a reporter finds the way to Braun headquarters, and few bother, the candidate’s only handout is a thick book of photocopied documents intended to counter what the campaign calls “the nasties.”

These are the allegations that she kept money from the sale of timber belonging to her mother while Medicaid paid her mother’s nursing home bills, and the controversies over her relationship with former fiance Kgosie Matthews, manager of her Senate reelection bid. With Matthews, a lobbyist for the military dictatorship that ruled Nigeria, she traveled to that country while sanctions were in place because of human rights violations. The 1998 campaign also brought investigations over finances from the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Election Commission. Both probes were eventually dropped, but she lost her Senate re-election.

Even though she can be gracious to a fault, there is an anger that propels her: over having her credentials as a candidate questioned, over being dismissed prematurely.

“I’m outraged at the direction of this country,” Braun said. “That’s why I decided I was going to run for president. … You get outraged, and you do something about it.”