Culture Vultures: Primary Color
Steyn, Mark
"Culture Vultures: Primary Color" by Mark Steyn Primary Color New Hampshire Around this time in the electoral cycle, friends often say to me, "I can't stand any more of this interminable presidential campaign....
...Didn't see that one, either...
...And I say, "Try New Hampshire...
...Does this sound cranky to you...
...We saw to it they had the field ready...
...Nuclear annihilation for American cities would actually be a popular policy here, but I didn't see the ad...
...Lost Nation, lost jobs, you know...
...We're the most decentralized state in the Union...
...To us it all seems pretty hard to follow...
...So there were only three towns big enough to be considered small towns...
...So, while I've heard several messages about the Oui/Non referendum, I've got nothing from Phil or Lamar...
...Last time around, after Bill Clinton lost the primary but went on to win the election, we were told that the mystique of the Granite State's supposedly acute political antennae had at last been irreparably damaged...
...Conventional wisdom has long regarded our state's tax structure as off the map, but we must be doing something right...
...Next week the story was a media blitz that backfired —the Pat Buchanan commercial that supposedly offended New Hampshire by showing footage of the Challenger exploding...
...Like a bargain-basement Brigadoon, New Hampshire comes to life once every four years, though what the national media shows you isn't much like the New Hampshire we live in...
...Last year, this state turned down millions of dollars from the federal "Goals 2000" education program because there were too many strings attached...
...In fact, I'm not sure how you go about media-blitzing New Hampshire...
...Instead, they all drop out of the sky together, use the locals for set dressing, and then depart...
...No go...
...It would have been overcrowded...
...Usually, he looks the sort of fellow who's lost his job because he's been caught enjoying a bunk-up with his sister on company time...
...On a very cold day, if the wind's whipping past Holt's Ledge in the right direction, I can get Channel 8 from Poland Spring—in Maine —and they're not running campaign ads, either...
...The American Spectator • March 199 6 43...
...But the complacent belief that New Hampshirites are just like everyone else —a bland, homogenized puree of the week's opinion polls—lingered on long after governor Wilson withdrew...
...Whenever he brushes aside the Steve Forbes flat tax proposal and dismisses it as flaky and off the map, it seems an inadequate response in a state with a healthy suspiciousness of orthodox views on taxation.44 Traditionally, we've been the last reality stop before the campaign floats off into media fairytales about comeback kids with the Big Mo...
...the rest of us take Route 3. But that's beside the point...
...Just as New Hampshire-style decentralization is making it on the national agenda, so, in an almost inversely proportional development, the New Hampshire primary is gradually being centralized into merely another part of the national campaign...
...Sound only...
...To judge from the perplexed commentaries of the network anchors, the rest of America is finally as cranky as we are...
...42 March 1996 • The American Spectator miles away...
...But now, finally, our maddening, quirky primary may be succumbing to the broader trends it's resisted for so long...
...Donald Dwight, the driving force behind the New Hampshire for Powell committee, has one of those fancy satellite systems where they won't give you any of the local channels but beam in everything from a gazillion Cranky New Hampshire resists the media blitz...
...Whenever I've interviewed Pat Buchanan on the BBC, I've always admired his disinclination to follow the received wisdom on any subject...
...His helicopter landed in a cow pasture across the road, and Newt had to tread gingerly through the long grass, avoiding the manure with rather more skill than he's shown since...
...We'd probably have had a clean sweep, but most municipalities have populations of under i,000...
...But the BBC prefers to attribute his ill fortune to the failure of trickle-down economics or corporate downsizing or whatever...
...As an image of remote government it's familiar enough...
...This season felt like just another round in the lopsided tango between politicians and national press, leaving the rest of us to watch like wallflowers from the sidelines...
...It's difficult to maintain a decentralized, participatory democracy in an increasingly centralized, passive media culture...
...Pete Wilson started it, coming up here and banging on about immigration, as if that's going to cause any sparks—the only international border crossing here, at Pittsburg, is unmanned for most of the day...
...One incident last summer symbolized what has become of the relationship between the media, the pols, and the people...
...The media blitz passed by my postmistress as well, and the guy who runs the store, and the fellow who plows my road...
...We have one full-time, state-salaried elected official (the Governor), no state income tax, and no state sales tax...
...Or is it just that, once again, we were first in the nation, and we've waited patiently for the rest of you guys to catch up...
...Where can I go to get away from this daily diet of primary baloney from New Hampshire...
...On any issue under the sun, the last thing you'll ever hear any of the crusty old-timers up here say is, "Well, I think the government ought to do something about it...
...For example, there was supposed to be a Steve Forbes commercial declaring that only he can protect American cities from nuclear annihilation...
...Swapping my BBC announcer's jacket for regulation North Country plaid, though, I feel slightly differently about him...
...Next primary season, I'm proposing my town change its name to Deep Rooted Malaise...
...The Republican landslide seems to have been New Hampshire'sbelated vindication — a time when our supposedly peculiar virtues were in tune with the times...
...it's clear we got it right, after all—we declined to be sold on Bill Clinton, and it took the rest of you until November '94 to catch up with us...
...It's those choppers I remember most clearly...
...My wife and I were the advance team for Newt," Donald Dwight told me proudly...
...I had high hopes he might have seen a Phil Gramm ad on an NBC affiliate in Iowa...
...The journalists should he on the ground watching us through the politicians' eyes...
...Anyway, our famed ability to bring the presidential campaign down to earth, if only in the literal sense, has proved harder to live up to this time round...
...Our valley farms and clapboard commons can match Vermont for picturesqueness any day, but our image is the precise reverse of the Green Mountain State: in campaign season, the White Mountain State represents rural charm with the glossy sheen chiseled off until only the rough edges are left...
...Sometimes I can only pick up a relay from Sherbrooke, and that's the CBC —from Quebec...
...Well, yes, it was the wrong field, because there were too many helicopters," he agreed...
...As an image of remote media, it's more shocking...
...I'll bet she had a hard time cutting in this year...
...But someone must be watching them...
...But with hindsight, MARK STEYN is theater critic of the New Criterion and movie critic of the Spectator of London...
...In Northumberland, in Cook County, there's a small settlement called Lost Nation, which some BBC producer stumbled across on a state map years ago...
...Early on in every campaign, after watching the candidates on the network news desperately trying to impress some unimpressable crusty and flinty Granite Stater, the tetchier national columnists bemoan the way we have such a disproportional say in the election of the president, particularly since we're so unrepresentative-99 percent white, 98 percent gun owners, 97 percent Republican, 96 percent crusty, 95 percent flinty...
...I look on it as rather a healthy skepticism about, in the president's new buzz-word, the "possibilities" of government: the best government of all is one that leaves you alone...
...Traditionally, we've been the last reality stop before the campaign floats off into media fairytales about comeback kids with the Big Mo...
...I can get Channel 3 from Burlington—that's in Vermont—but they've no campaign ads there...
...many local politicians wondered aloud why we had a federal education department, and what exactly it was they did all day, anyway...
...Come primary time, they send one of their elegant electronic essayists up there, who intones solemnly, "To get from Lancaster to Groveton, you have to drive through Lost Nation...
...CULTURE VULTURES by Mark Steyn Primary Color New Hampshire Around this time in the electoral cycle, friends often say to me, "I can't stand any more of this interminable presidential campaign...
...Newt observed that Mel was a tree farmer, someone inclined to take the long view...
...The strictly electronic nature of the Steve Forbes candidacy has been remarkable: he seems determined to buck four decades of history and be the first guy to take the Granite State in a nationally directed advertising campaign...
...Four of them whirring overhead en route to Orford—one for Newt and his staff, and three for the attending journalists...
...Since the '94 elections, devolution of federal power is a serious issue: it's the Big Idea of the nineties, even if it's started with small things like the abolition of the federal speed limit...
...most revenue is raised and spent at the town level...
...In French...
...Actually, only the BBC has to drive through Lost Nation to get from Lancaster to Groveton...
...On the network news, we'll hear of a media blitz, but we never see it...
...But it was the wrong field," I pointed out...
...And Mel's son managed to get the cows out in time...
...There was Mount Cobe maple syrup, and Gale made her famous cornmeal pancakes...
...Former Governor Meldrim Thomson, his wife Gale, and their sons were hosting a breakfast for Newt Gingrich at the family farm in Orford...
...New Hampshire decentralized the presidential election, devolving it to one-to-one contact with the flinty locals who cut the White House fancypantses down to size...
...I have not seen a single political television ad," Donald says dreamily...
...For forty years, the state's electoral philosophy has been the same as its political one...
...In the latest edition of The ioo Best Small Towns In America, three of the top ten were here in Grafton County...
...Every primary season, there's a leathery old gal who tells some journalist or other, "I don't vote for no candidate I haven't danced with"— a formulation that should be preserved on the National Register of Historic Soundbites...
...There is another small settlement called Happy Valley that is much nearer the airport, but no camera crews go there...
...It's blissful up here...
...You can't but be struck by the name's significance," he says, before interviewing someone who's lost his job at the mill...
...That makes us cranky and untypical, according to the New York Times...
...For most of its four-and-a-half decades of primary primacy, New Hampshire has been at odds with the ratchet affect in American politics, whereby power moves remorselessly to the center...
...The Governor said Newt should stick to the Speakership, and that there'd be time enough down the road to run for the White House...
...Look for us on the network news...
Vol. 29 • March 1996 • No. 3
