In PlayThree Presidential Candidates in New Hampshire, 2008
This year’s attenuated contest for the Democratic presidential nomination has, inevitably, generated its own special lexicon: “green-collar jobs,” “pastor-gate,” “presumptive nominee,” any of which would have been head-scratchers just a few months ago. The most telling and significant phrase to come into play this year, though, is “in play” itself. Week after week, contest after contest, voters in large states (California, New York) and small states (Wyoming, Vermont) and not-exactly-states-at-all (Guam, Puerto Rico) have been delighted to learn that they are, finally, “in play” — that the outcome is uncertain, that all (or, now, both) of the campaigns are competing fiercely for their votes, and that, in short, their votes really do count. When your state is in play, you can make some rather sweeping presumptions: - Candidates will appear locally, with or without the national media in tow. - Candidates will be subject to the close scrutiny of voters who will not necessarily limit their attention to the candidates’ chosen talking points. - Voters will receive lavish attention from the campaigns, in the form of mailings, personal visits, and phone calls, and also from the national press, in the form of polls, interviews, in-depth analysis, etc. - The approaching day of decision, whether conducted via secret balloting or caucuses or some locally idiosyncratic hybrid (as in Texas), will be a matter of undeniable consequence both here (wherever “here” may be) and across the nation as a whole. New Hampshire, of course, has been in play every election year in living memory, and the political culture of New Hampshire has evolved around the presumptions that come with being in play. In fact, the state constitution actually requires New Hampshire to hold its primary election before that of any other state. (Iowa doesn’t count because Iowans select their convention delegates with a caucus system, not an “election.” And Hawkeyes, of course, cling to their first-in-the-nation prerogative every bit as fiercely as Granite Staters.) What’s so amazing about 2008 is that, for the first time pretty much ever, every American voter, or at least every Democrat and every registered independent voter, gets to sample the New Hampshire experience of being in play, a deep and powerful sense of meaningful citizenship: my voice counts, my ideas are important, I fully embrace the responsibility of democracy. To first-timers this is nothing short of thrilling. The executive director of the South Dakota state Democratic Party told a New York Times reporter: “It’s like rocket fuel was spread over the state. There’s so much excitement.” To be sure, the whole system is ridiculous — the money, the ads, the polls, the nonsense. But of course the fact is that the Constitution, in its attempt to create from whole cloth a perfectly rational system of democratic, republican national governance, neglected to create a rational system of electing our governors (by which I mean any and all of our leaders). Apparently the Founders thought that the only possible point of contention about this would hinge upon the rivalries of large vs. small states, so they “resolved” the matter by means of the Electoral College. And then mere mortals got involved and the whole thing’s been a mess ever since, worse every time. Yes: I agree that it’s crazy for New Hampshire and Iowa to have had a lock on the attention of all the candidates for the first year-plus of every presidential campaign, that it’s not “fair” ... but the rebuttals are also persuasive (that no system could possibly be “fair” anyhow, that NH and IA take this business very, very seriously, and that their smallness is, in this instance, a great virtue, forcing on the candidates a somewhat-more-authentic-than-TV “retail politics” than would be possible in, say, California or Texas). In any case, I’m sure that the other states won’t put up with it any longer — especially now that nearly every state has had the exhilarating experience of being in play. (The jury’s still out on Florida and Michigan, whose attempts to jump the queue may have taken them out of play altogether. You only get to be in play when a national consensus lets you be in play.) Ah, there’s nothing quite as intoxicating as being in play. Here’s how it felt to me four months ago, when it seemed so worthwhile to fire off a dispatch from the in-play trenches: I’m grateful to the fates that I moved to New Hampshire in time for this one last (?) waltz around the dance floor of New Hampshire’s First-in-the-Nation Presidential Primary. The stereotypical yankee type, the laconic, skeptical, ornery cuss, is pretty well suited to demanding more from the campaigns than the banality and vapidity that are the electoral norm in this country. The local NPR affiliate, NHPR, has supersaturated us with election info for over a year now — not just the bumper-sticker level stuff, but the “deep code” of the candidate’s positions, plans, histories. People here are really into it, very sophisticated about evaluating politicians. (Which is not at all to say enlightened, only to say that even in those instances when New Hampshirites vote stupidly, at least they do it with sophistication.) So unlike, say, those Huckabee rallies in Iowa where people come close to prematurely rapturing even before Huck gets a word out of his mouth, in New Hampshire people listen politely, clap a bit at things they like, and sit in stony silence during the meaningless drivel intended for a national audience. I’ve been to three rallies since last summer. The first was for Barack Obama at a farm near Peterborough (about 9 miles from here). I brought my dog along and as we were filing into the field, past the sign-up sheets, one of the Obamians pointed to Trooper and asked, “Oh, is he for Obama too?” “He’s the only black Lab in the race,” I said. There were a few people there with buttons and signs and stickers, but for the most part I had a sense that people were still at the window-shopping stage. (The stereotypical New Hampshirite sees no rational reason for committing to one candidate or another before election day itself, and guards her preferences like she guards her PIN.) The “warm-up act” was reasonably, mercifully brief, just a short introduction of Obama by the farm-owner. Then Obama came, only a few minutes late to accommodate late-comers without ticking everybody else off. In his open shirt and tailored slacks he might have been on his way to a disco, and that was fine. He was loose, bouncy — this guy really loves politicking, and he’s damn good at it. He comes across as smart and kind and honorable and funny; he gets people nodding along, laughing. There was certainly nothing he said that I disagree with — nothing that anyone even a bit left of center could disagree with. A lot of this kind of thing: “The American people are not the problem; the American people are the solution.” He tried, with only partial success, to get a church- or stadium-style call and response thing going with alternating choruses of “Ready to go!” and what I heard as “Fire it up!” Yeah! (I was very disappointed when, later that very day, I found an article in Slate that described an Obama rally and revealed that what he was really shouting was “Fired up!”) All in all, he got a good reception but I never felt what I imagine to be the electricity of a campaign that’s really on a roll, a campaign that’s winning. I’m sure I wasn’t the only person there who thought that Obama was getting an early, early start on 2012 or 2016. (Mind you, this was rural New Hampshire on a gorgeous, languid late-summer day in September. By the time you read this, if Obama has just won in Iowa, his rallies will be completely nutso — that is, downright rapturous.) The second “event” I attended was for John Edwards, held in Peterborough Town Hall, an 1850-ish auditorium perfectly designed for just his sort of thing. There’s a little stage on one end (for contra dance bands); chairs were set up there as well as the main floor, leaving a small theater-in-the-round. After an intro so short that I can’t recall anything about it, Edwards came on, looking exactly like Edwards, big smile, perfect hair, sleeves rolled up, ah-shucks body language. First he did a little family shtick — his kids came out with him, dressed up in their Halloween costumes as a ballerina (the little girl) and a Roman legionnaire (the little boy), and then they scampered off to go trick-or-treating as the audience chuckled and said Awww. Then Edwards did his bit, no notes, a lot of it populist this&that aimed vaguely at the GOP (“I don’t believe in the genetic lottery”), a lot of it veiled or not-veiled attacks on Hillary Clinton (she of the “special interests”). I had a very mixed reaction, probably representative of the crowd: on the one hand, here was a very smart, sincere, focused guy, who just happens to have, hands down (as of late October), the most perfectly detailed set of proposals with which I can find no fault whatever ... and on the other hand, he had certain rhetorical ticks that were driving me crazy. First, he seemed to have been coached, maybe by some consultant, maybe some 9th-grade public-speaking teacher, to Dumb It Down, Dumb It Down, Dumb It Down, and then to Hammer Home Your Brand (“my father who worked in the mills,” “influential Washington lobbyists,” etc. etc. etc.). If it’s worth saying once, it’s worth saying seven times. And then, even more bothersome to me, either his fundamental nature or some other consultant seemed to have coached him to Always Be Nice, so he kept interrupting his train of thought to insert qualifying nice-guy phrases like “not that there’s anything wrong with that,” “she’s a good friend of mine,” “I’m sure for the best of motives,” etc. As with Obama, I wanted not just a vague indictment of Bush and the GOP but real, hyperventilating, red-faced rage — and as with Obama, we were getting instead lot of careful, nice-guy platitudes about how we as a nation could do better, about how we as a nation deserved better, about how we as a nation were better, and so on and so on. (I have to say, though, that he was very good in Q & A, as though questions gave him permission to be a lot more specific and a lot more dynamic. He was breathtakingly succinct in his rejection of nuclear power as a “solution to global warming,” for example.) It’s the nature of these “events,” I suppose, that they must be calculated above all to show the colors, utter reassuring bromides, and not offend anyone. So both “events” left me vaguely impressed with the candidates, vaguely willing to support either of them, and vaguely dispirited by a process that seems to require such choreographed vapidity even from such smart, engaging guys as Obama and Edwards. I’d much prefer to have dinner with them — in New Hampshire one grows to expect that kind of intimacy. I stumbled blindly into my third “event” of the season: I was picking a friend up from the Manchester airport — a New Yorker who had actually researched the attractions of Manchester and decided that he simply had to have lunch at the Red Arrow Diner. Even as we were driving up it was clear that something was going on. There were lines of people out front, cops, TV trucks, creepy guys in suits with wires in their ears — and no parking anywhere nearby, of course. So we finally ditched the car a few blocks away, came back, went up to a cop, and asked what was going on. “Hillary’s here,” he said. “Well,” I responded, “can we just go in and eat?” He shrugged and let us by. Evidently the crowd were all reporters waiting to pounce on people coming out after being in Her Presence. And there She was in a booth near the front, carrying on a regular conversation with a couple of ordinary people ... except that there were TV lights on them, and TV cameras and reporters crammed in everywhere, looking on impatiently, and the ordinary people in the booth with Hillary appeared simultaneously thrilled, mortified, and confused. I couldn’t quite make out what any of them were saying, but soon enough she got up and thanked them and small-talked her way to the door, with the cursed TV lights tracking every move. I found all this quite creepy — but here again, I can’t blame the candidate per se, since this is simply how the thing is done. I feel less indulgent toward the fourth and final “event” I witnessed: two days later Hillary appeared at a rally at the same Peterborough Town Hall where I’d seen Edwards. A very different feeling from that, though. For one thing, the crowd was much bigger; in fact, the joint was packed. And the TV trucks were here for her. (I hadn’t seen any at the Edwards rally.) Instead of the informal circle of folding chairs at the front, now the stage area was all done up with a floodlit backdrop festooned (“Rove-ishly,” I thought) with silhouettes of green windmills at dawn and the slogan “POWERING AMERICA’S FUTURE: New Energy - New Jobs” and the url of her campaign website. The canned warm-up music included the Police doing “Every Little Thing She Does” and a contemporary version of the Monkees’ “I’m a Believer” and then Earth, Wind, & Fire doing “Shining Star.” Then the local rep in the state legislature, Jill Shaffer Hammond, came on and gave a long, boring introductory speech, followed by TV’s own Bob Vila (the “This Old House” guy) giving a short, dynamic intro while a sign-language lady mouthed and gesticulated along. Today’s event, we learned, was the launch of a new campaign theme, America’s Green Future. Then Hillary herself came on — a huge letdown for me, because I’d come mostly wanting to see Bill. She looked good, very nattily turned out in a dark pantsuit, and she has undeniable star power that really excited a lot of the people in the crowd. But she quickly killed that excitement by reading a dull statement of today’s Green theme, just reading it ... until, rather unexpectedly, she looked up and delivered an electrifying extemporaneous screed against Bush/Cheney that had the crowd cheering. Then more dull reading, this time a bullet-list of proposals, all geo-this and green-that. Now, all the while her voice was failing, turning into a barely audible croak — at length she simply had to stop, she coughed, tried to resume reading but had to cough again, and then rasped out a little joke about sounding like Tallulah Bankhead that got a few rather strained laughs, until some guy shouted, “Hang in there!” and she whispered back as loudly as she could into the mike, “That’s one thing you know about me: I hang in there.” Wild cheers at this. At last she got to her closing line about how her/our parents were the Greatest Generation so now we had to become the Greenest Generation. Huzzahs. If the whole thing had ended there, or at least gone to Q & A, I would have been pretty damn impressed overall, despite the slick Theme of the Week packaging. But no — a team of flunkies hauled out two armchairs, and Hillary and Bob sat down with their cordless mikes for a painfully scripted “conversation” consisting of Bob’s softball questions and Hillary’s dull, over-practiced speeches on various greeny topics. “I’m so glad you asked about that, Bob.” She came across as an A-student turned teacher, often calling upon the audience to raise our hands if, say, we’ve ever been to Barrow, Alaska, or if we know how to decode Energy Star numbers on home appliances. After a while Bob made himself scarce and the staged “conversation” gave way to Q & A with the audience. A woman questioner got the biggest ovation of the day when she demanded to know why HC hadn’t used the opportunity of this campaign to decry the Bush administration’s fear-mongering. Hillary got good traction by contrasting GWB with FDR, but then lost track and droned on much too long and too vapidly about hope, optimism, etc. Other questioners made dull statements about things like LED leakage, the aesthetics of wind farms, the virtues of carpooling. Hillary nodded brightly while they spoke (“Yes, yes! I get it, I get it!”); all of her responses seemed to hinge on the creation of “smart grids.” So that was Hillary Clinton in person — every bit as smart as Obama and Edwards, every bit as impressive and blessed with even greater star wattage, quite brilliant at her best moments ... but also, at her less-than-best moments, much duller and wonkier than Edwards, and much more vapid and vague than Obama. And in the same way, she’s both the phoniest of the three — by far — and yet she allows these stark, fleeting glimpses of an authentic self having immense stature and dignity. I have no idea how each will fare with the caucus-goers in Iowa tonight, or with the voters in New Hampshire next week. I hope each of them does well enough to stay firmly in the race for as long as possible, and when the dust settles I hope that none is damaged too badly. I could live with any of the three as nominee. I’d be happy enough to see any of the three (or, for that matter, Richardson or Biden or Dodd or even Kucinich) go to the White House. What I’d really like, I think, is a parliamentary system that would make Obama the head of state — America’s face in the world — and make Edwards head of government — the top idea guy and manager — and make Clinton chief fixer, scold, tail-twister, and lightning rod. But of course we don’t have a parliamentary system: we just have one president who’s supposed to be all things to all Americans. God help us, the job’s impossible, and getting much, much worse. But by God I’ll go to the polls next week, declare myself a Democrat long enough to take a ballot and cast my vote, then go back to the sign-in table, restore my independent status, and hope for the best. That’s how it works in New Hampshire — Live Free or Don’t!
Well, that was January, back when New Hampshire was still in play and the looming Super Tuesday was supposed to ensure that, before the day was through, nobody else — in Texas or Ohio or Pennsylvania or Wyoming or North Carolina or Guam or anywhere — would get to be in play at all. But Super Tuesday ended nothing. One by one all the candidates but Obama and Clinton bowed out, and one by one each state has had its moment in the limelight. And now, with just a small handful of contests remaining (and still, miraculously, in play), nearly every American is in on the New Hampshire secret: in a real democracy every vote counts and every voter is important. Whether or not this long season of pastor-bating and “iron my shirt” and “hardworking white Americans” has been good for the Democrats, it’s certainly been good for democracy. Before you know it, even Republicans will insist on their democratic right to be in play. * * * A few days after my wife and I moved to rural New Hampshire three years ago, a man drove up and introduced himself as a local maple sugar producer. He wanted permission, when the season came, to tap five big old sugar maples in front of our house. Fascinated at the prospect of seeing this process first-hand, I quickly said yes. Months later, in the waning weeks of winter, the taps and buckets appeared on our trees, and shortly thereafter a quart jug of syrup appeared on our porch. Now, I’ve always loved pancakes and I thought I had a pretty discriminating palate for decent syrup. But this stuff wasn’t just good — it was startlingly good, good in a way that made me redefine “good syrup” altogether. And there’s no going back: no mass-produced, high-fructose, maple-flavored syrup will ever grace our table. And as with syrup, so with presidential politics: once you’ve tasted the real thing there’s just no going back. No American voter whose state has been in play will ever be content to be taken for granted again by high-fructose, fly-over, phone-it-in, photo-op candidates. We can expect a nationwide clamor like never before as newly awakened state parties vie for early slots in the electoral calendar. Who can blame them? And if some other state manages to wrest the first-in-the-nation status away from New Hampshire, I hope they’ll remember New Hampshire’s gift to the nation: how to do this right.
(c) Michael Fleming New Ipswich, New Hampshire May, 2008
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