Beauty, brains and a bold message

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Angela McGlowan laughs as she recalls how she sought a job after arriving in Washingtonasafreshly minted University of Mississippi graduate in the early 1990s, visiting congressional offices and handing out her resume.

"I walked along the corridors of Capitol Hill and no one would give me a job," she says, sweeping back her long hair as she sits at a conference table in her Arlington office. "I was temping for $8 an hour for a law firm."

The president and chief executive officer of Political Strategies & Insights says she didn't understand networking as a career strategy. A friend who did understand, and who knew Ms. McGlowan's beauty queen past, suggested a way to get her high-heeled foot in the door.

"A girlfriend of mine said, 'Angela, you're beautiful, you're brilliant; you should go for Miss District of Columbia. It's about access in this town, it's about who you know.' I said, 'I'm smart. I don't need to be in a beauty pageant.' But I learned the hard way."

Back home in Mississippi, Ms. McGlowan had held such titles as Miss Magnolia, but she had hoped to leave behind the pageant circuit when she arrived in the nation's capital.

After she captured the title of Miss District of Columbia USA in 1994, however, she found that doors suddenly opened for her.

A serious message

A Republican political consultant and Fox News Channel contributor, Ms. McGlowan can laugh now as she recounts her early days in Washington and prepares to promote her first book, "Bamboozled: How Americans Are Being Exploited by the Lies of the Liberal Agenda."

Even as she laughs, however, Ms. McGlowan has a serious message.

"I have been wanting to write this book all my life," she says, citing as her inspiration a stanza of poetry by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: