McCain's bet on N.H. could pay big
The Republican is finding audiences receptive to his independent streak.
By WES ALLISON, Times Staff Writer
Published January 7, 2008
SALEM, N.H. - If Sen. John McCain moves into the White House a year from now, it will be because of people like Dick Cartier, a retired engineer from a small city in a state about the size of Hillsborough County.
Cartier, 71, an independent who can vote in either party's primary when New Hampshire chooses its presidential nominees Tuesday, had been considering John Edwards on the Democratic side. Among Republicans, he liked McCain and Mitt Romney.
By noon Sunday, as he waited with his video camera for McCain to arrive for a town hall meeting, he had settled on McCain, won over by his straight talk and military service, including five years being tortured in an enemy prison after his fighter jet was shot down in Vietnam.
"Picture this: John McCain is sitting down in the president's seat and looks up and says, 'God, you got one hell of a sense of humor,'" Cartier said. "From being on death's door for five years, then suddenly he's sitting in the White House.
"That's a strong person. That's the kind of guy you want."
McCain, 71, has staked his political future on the state that first suggested he was presidential material eight years ago, and where he believes his maverick streak will resonate with voters known for their independence.
The Arizona senator started the 2008 campaign on top, but his fortunes tumbled after he embraced unpopular positions on Iraq and immigration.
By July, with his poll numbers here near 10 percent, he was widely given up for dead. But then violence began to dip in Iraq, and McCain's longtime support for sending more troops, later embraced by President Bush, began to look prescient. Also, he began rehabilitating himself on immigration, vowing to plug the U.S. borders.
Soon,New Hampshire voters concerned with national security began drifting to McCain after Rudy Giuliani failed to thrive.
Now McCain finds himself six points ahead of Romney in the latest CNN/WMUR poll of likely Republican primary voters in this state. Giuliani is a distant third.
"He definitely has momentum in his favor, whereas Romney is fighting to hang on," said Andrew E. Smith, director of the Survey Center. "If McCain doesn't win New Hampshire he's done, and he's known that since the beginning."
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The Granite State is a good place to make his stand.
Unlike Iowa and South Carolina, evangelicals are a small slice of the Republican Party here.
They delivered former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee a victory in Iowa last week, and Romney, a Mormon, has been working hard to earn their trust.
Although McCain is socially conservative on most counts, opposing abortion and gay marriage, he's had a rocky relationship with the religious right.
That's okay here, where Republican voters don't like mixing religion and politics, and most support legal abortion.
There is something, too, about McCain that makes him appear a natural in New Hampshire, a vestige of the New England upper crust -graduate of an elite boarding school and the U.S. Naval Academy, son of a Navy admiral.
Speaking to voters in his gray fleece jacket and boots on a frigid night in Derry, N.H., last week, he looked ready to hop into a 1982 Jeep Wagoneer with wood-grain paneling and head home to his Labrador retrievers.
Romney looks like the polished Boston capitalist he is. It's part of his image as Mr. Fix-It, key to his pitch that he'll restore competency in Washington.
But some voters find him too slick, and more than a few remarked that he seems to have changed his positions to appeal to conservatives, who dominate the GOP nationally but not in New Hampshire.
"I am impressed by his business acumen, but he changes as the political climate changes," Margaret White, 69, a retired nurse, said about Romney at McCain's town hall meeting in Derry.
"He stands up for what he believes in," she said of McCain. "New Hampshire doesn't like waffles."
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The heart of McCain's campaign is the freewheeling town hall meeting, like the one Sunday in Salem, a one- to two-hour session with voters where he makes a brief pitch, then takes questions. He has held more than 100 across the state in the past year, including about a dozen in the past week. To some extent, they allow McCain to explain himself.
Many conservatives are unhappy with some stances he's taken, and folks in the audience almost always ask about them. McCain takes it head-on.
His past opposition to President Bush's tax cuts? He favors cutting taxes, but not without cutting spending. "We went astray, beginning in 2001," he said in Derry on Thursday.
Backing a bill to limit pollution to combat global warming? If global warming isn't real, he told one questioner in Salem on Sunday, then at least we're giving our children a cleaner world.
And immigration? McCain acknowledges the nation must secure the borders. But he maintains the nation needs a reasonable and practical solution for processing the illegal immigrants already here, and sending them all home isn't it.
"All of these people are God's children, and we believe that we are created in God's image," he told the crowd in Derry. "We need to handle this issue in a way that's compassionate."
Immigration, however, still threatens to sink McCain. Keenly aware, Romney has been attacking McCain for supporting "amnesty" for illegal immigrants in debates, speeches and ads airing across New Hampshire.
Gary Boutin, 53, of Salem agreed that McCain "was a little soft on the border." But his willingness to engage with voters was a big reason he supported him in 2000, and it's why he was holding a McCain sign Sunday.
"I don't agree with all of his stands," Boutin said, "but I know where he stands."
Wes Allison can be reached at allison@sptimes.com or (202) 463-0577.