New Hampshire Blues
GITELL, SETH
New Hampshire Blues The new Vermont. BY SETH GITELL Salem, New Hampshire In late November, questioners at a three-hour Barack Obama forum in Portsmouth seemed determined to drive the...
...Not in New Hampshire...
...And just last year, the Democratic party made strides in New Hampshire that would have seemed inconceivable a decade ago...
...New Hampshire is a state that’s gone blue, even deep blue, a fact that is hard to escape at campaign events around the state...
...New Hampshire really has changed in many ways...
...Obama and Clinton routinely draw large crowds, bigger this year than the Republicans’—a reality driven home by the 8,500 voters who showed up on a snowy night in Manchester to see Obama appear with Oprah Winfrey...
...But there are two other groups that are well represented at the unceasing daytime town meetings and campaign events during primary season...
...Just eight years ago, New Hampshire voters rebuffed the lofty and sometimes aloof rhetoric of Bill Bradley for Al Gore, a candidate then focused on mundane lunch pail issues...
...These folks come to New Hampshire’s academic centers—Peterborough, Durham, Exeter—looking for clean air, organically farmed foodstuffs, and community...
...Many of them have done quite well in New Hampshire— Gene McCarthy almost beat Lyndon Johnson in 1968, Gary Hart bested Walter Mondale in 1984...
...Not all these newcomers are politically identical...
...In other parts of the country, the U.N...
...Such encounters are common on the Democratic side, so much so that a visitor who hasn’t been to New Hampshire in a while might wonder what’s happened to the Granite State, known for its fl inty and self-reliant residents in their small-town settings worthy of Norman Rockwell...
...The state’s Democrats seem more liberal and anti-establishment than ever...
...Mrs...
...And, according to a recent study by the University of New Hampshire’s Carsey Institute, 207,000 people moved in and 188,000 left between 2001 and 2005, a period that coincides with the post-9/11 awakening of the progressive wing of the Democratic party...
...Andrew Smith, the director of UNH’s Survey Center, maintains, for example, that many of the Massachusetts expatriates in the southern tier who fl ed high taxes and housing prices are now the most Republican-leaning voters in the state, which still has no income tax...
...The U.N...
...Fergus Cullen, the chairman of New Hampshire’s Republican party, concedes that these voters “tend to be not that good for Republicans”—though he takes solace in the fact that the state is still far more Independent (44 percent) Seth Gitell, a contributing editor at the New York Sun, blogs at gitell.com...
...A series of candidates have run for the Democratic nomination claiming the outsider’s mantle...
...They have the time, money, and interest to listen to candidates unveil their proposals in person, instead of watching them on C-SPAN...
...In the 1992 Democratic primary, when Paul Tsongas, a Greek American raised as a fi scally conservative Yankee, defeated Bill Clinton here, talk was still of the economy, the budget defi cit, and health care...
...The changing electoral tide has invigorated the state’s Democratic activists, so much so that they seem to demonstrate more partisan vigor even than their neighbors to the south in Massachusetts...
...At the federal level, Democrats captured both House seats, with Paul Hodes and Carol SheaPorter replacing Charles Bass and Jeb Bradley, respectively...
...Hodes had run for Congress in 2004, but Shea-Porter had entered the limelight that year as a protester wearing a “Turn Your Back on Bush” T-shirt at a campaign event for the president...
...The Institute estimates that 23.5 percent of the people voting on January 8 will be fi rst-time New Hampshire voters...
...Take this earnest query from a selfdescribed “potter” from Exeter: “I’ve had a U.N...
...The fi rst are affl uent and highly educated retirees from other northeastern states, drawn to New Hampshire by its pastoral environs and low costs...
...Obama and his foreign policy and national security advisers—among them Susan Rice, Richard Danzig, and Anthony Lake—were in New Hampshire to demonstrate the seriousness of his policies and his r?sum?, but the questions came at them from far left field...
...It was left to Obama, incidentally, to caution: “The U.N...
...Demographers like Peter Francese note that of its 1.3 million people almost 500,000 have arrived in the last two decades...
...It pains me to think of how our respect for the United Nations has been drained away in these years under the current administration...
...fl ag fl ying from my front porch since the beginning of the war...
...and Republican (30 percent) than it is Democratic (26 percent...
...A portion of the state’s proliferating Independent voters seem to be the political equivalent of locavores— those who eat only food produced within, say, 50 miles of their homes...
...A few weeks earlier a Hillary Clinton town meeting in Peterborough came to a halt amid hooting and applause when a questioner, who boasted of never having had “a dryer or an air conditioner,” queried the candidate about what she would do to change the more than “six years we have been subjected to fear-mongering...
...In state races in 2006, the Democrats retained the governor’s offi ce, both houses of the legislature, and the executive council (a fi ve-seat elected executive body...
...Quips Dante Scala, a political science professor at UNH, of his state’s increasing resemblance to Vermont, in some places it “looks like there is some kind of infi ltration taking place...
...They’re not so different from their counterparts in Vermont, or in College Town, USA, but they stand out in a state with such a small population...
...We’ll see who that will help on January 8...
...BY SETH GITELL Salem, New Hampshire In late November, questioners at a three-hour Barack Obama forum in Portsmouth seemed determined to drive the candidate straight to the fringes...
...might be viewed with skepticism— even with fear by conspiracists of another sort, the black helicopter crowd...
...That was a long time ago, and New Hampshire today has as much in common with itself back then as the Gore of today has with candidate Gore in 2000...
...I want to know what you would do to restore our respect as a country for the United Nations and the United Nations’ respect for America...
...question was by no means unique...
...has its fl aws...
...Clinton, who called the question “eloquent,” gave an answer juxtaposing the need to respond to the September 11 attacks and Franklin Roosevelt’s famous words, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself...
Vol. 13 • December 2008 • No. 16
