Perspective

New Hampshire melted my cold Floridian heart

By WES ALLISON, Times Staff Writer
Published January 13, 2008

Postcard New Hampshire: Cilleyville Bog Covered Bridge near Andover. Political New Hampshire: Incredibly well-informed primary voters who take their role of participating in the nation's first primary seriously and winnow the chaff.
	[Martha Rial | Times]

It is wicked cold here in Dover, N.H., and the residents are pale and lumpy in their New England Patriots jackets, and the roadsides are festooned with campaign signs planted in the sooty snow banks like flags in Mount Everest, and in so many ways it is so much different than the rest of America.

If New Hampshire were applying for the job of vetting candidates for president of these United States, one might suggest that New Hampshire look elsewhere for work, like at one of the approximately 1,443,713 Dunkin' Donuts that cover the state, the way corn covers Iowa.

As a political reporter for Florida's largest newspaper, my sense has long been that New Hampshire played an outsized role in choosing the nation's presidential candidates.

It has only 1.3-million residents, far fewer than live in the Tampa Bay area. More than 95 percent of them are white. You can drive from one end of New Hampshire to the other and back in less time than it takes to get from St. Petersburg to Miami, and that's taking the long way.

It is dangerously close to Canada, a foreign country full of foreigners who, if they were to sneak across the border, would be illegal immigrants.

So what makes the Granite State so great, so prescient, that it should tell everyone else in the country who should be president? Wondering that very same thing, the Florida Legislature last year moved the Sunshine State's Democratic and Republican primary elections to Jan. 29, figuring a large, diverse and politically important state deserved a bigger role in choosing the next presidential candidates.

New Hampshire and the other early primary and caucus states - Iowa, Nevada and South Carolina - were not amused. Vetting presidents was their job, their political leaders insisted. Florida was too big to serve as a laboratory, and it cost too much to campaign there. Besides, the argument went, folks in other states just didn't have the tradition and interest in choosing the best candidates.

"It's part of the culture here," said Fergus Cullen, the chairman of the New Hampshire Republican Party. "This is sort of hard for outsiders to appreciate, and I recognize that. But because the process has evolved over the last half century, voters take their role very seriously. We go to forums, go to town meetings, and make very informed decisions."

That's the myth, anyway. But is it true?

Hit the ground shivering

I arrived in Concord, N.H., around 3 p.m. about a week before the election. The digital thermometer outside the Merrimack County Bank read 10 degrees, but Ron Paul supporters were marching back and forth in the snow along Main Street, dressed like colonists from the Revolutionary War period.

Behind the fogged-up glass walls of Barack Obama's office downtown, rows of campaign workers called potential supporters to ask for their votes. Young volunteers from Florida, Virginia and New York were pouring in, ready to go door-to-door to get out the votes for their candidates.

Nina Hopkins of Henniker, N.H., emerged from the John Edwards office in downtown Concord with an armful of brochures and loaded them into her minivan. She and her kids, Brenna, 8, and Micaela, 9, planned to deposit them with neighbors as they walked their dog.

In 2000, Hopkins had supported Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Republican, but she was won over by Edwards, a former Democratic senator from North Carolina, and his populist message of change. That's not the kind of switch you'll see in a lot of states.

"We think for ourselves out here. That's why we like the candidates coming here," she said. "We want to hear them speak, and ask them questions. We take it very seriously."

And then there were the passers-by. After 17 years of covering government at every level, from sewer commissions to the races for the U.S. Senate, House and presidency, never have I found so many people so well-informed. Almost without exception, everyone I stopped on the street was eager to talk about the upcoming presidential primaries and, what's more, had a cogent opinion about whom they liked, and why.

Maybe these people weren't packing political events just to get in out of the cold.

There is, indeed, a tradition of direct democracy unlike that in almost any other state. New Hampshire's state House of Representatives boasts more members than any other state - there are 400 of them, in fact, one for about every 3,000 residents. Almost every supervisory position in local and county government is elected, and every official - even the governor - must stand for re-election every two years.

Voter turnout typically surpasses 70 percent, nearly 20 percent higher than the national average.

But my first real ah-hah moment came a week ago Saturday. People had started lining up around 8 a.m. for an 11 a.m. rally with Sen. Barack Obama at a high school in Nashua. The line soon stretched about half a mile. Kids drew Obama's name on the blacktop with chunks of ice. By 10 a.m., more than 2,000 people were waiting cheerfully, including Craig and Melinda Willever, who had driven more than an hour from Portsmouth. It was 23 degrees.

"We really have an impact on how people vote in this country," explained Mr. Willever, 51, a postal worker.

Added his wife, an antiques dealer, "It's a privilege."

The second defining moment came around noon on Monday, the day before the election. I was covering Sen. Hillary Clinton, a Democrat from New York who would narrowly win the primary, at a town hall meeting in Dover, up near Portsmouth, when I met Wendy Beagen, 47, of Madbury, N.H.. She was going to see Obama that night, too.

"I wasn't even going to come here today because I've already heard her speak," Beagan said. "But why not? No one else gets this chance."

She called it an honor.

Thinking with ego

You'll be hard pressed to convince me that the Democratic leaders of the four approved early voting states -Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada and South Carolina - were thinking with their heads when they pushed the leading Democratic candidates to boycott Florida after the state moved its primary to Jan. 29, a week earlier than allowed.

They were thinking with their egos.

But despite my earlier skepticism, I now believe the argument that Florida could mess up what seems like a valuable process, particularly in New Hampshire. Yes, Florida looks more like America. Yes, winning Florida has become key to winning the presidency.

But New Hampshire doesn't really choose the next president, or even the next presidential nominees. Its voters last week didn't anoint Clinton and McCain, who won the Republican contest; they just let them keep going.

The last two presidents - George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who together served 16 years - both lost New Hampshire. McCain beat Bush there in 2000, and you probably don't remember who beat Clinton in 1992 the late Sen. Paul Tsongas.

Instead, the Granite Staters cull those candidates whose organizations, ideas or personas just aren't quite ready for prime time. Their questions and scrutiny prepare the survivors to meet the rest of us. And from what I can tell, they do a wicked good job.

Wes Allison covers national politics from the Times Washington bureau. He can be reached at allison@sptimes.com or (202) 463-0577.

[Last modified January 12, 2008, 21:03:36]