Ayuh! Love New Hampshuh!

I am having something of a difficult time wrapping my brain around the odd idea that New Hampshire is a swing state this year,(note that Brian Faler, a former OU colleague of all three Rebunkers, is Broder’s research assistant and that he gets a little credit at the end of this piece) a concept that never would have crossed my mind in high school in the late 1980s. And it is even odder to think that the voters in the Granite State could be a deciding factor in a General Election. Yet the once-unthinkable is now, well, thinkable.

This year, as it was four years ago, New Hampshire is a battleground state. If you grow up in New Hampshire, you grow accustomed to an odd courtship every four years: During the blustery, cold, snowy, raw winter months, potential presidential candidates show up practically on your doorstep, like 1950s beaus seeking a father’s permission to date his daughter. February rolls around, the courtship is in a high-speed tizzy. Pancake breakfasts in Keene; Awkward coffee shop handshaking in Manchester; Guys in $1500 suits on stage at the rickety high school gym in Newport. Then the Primary rolls around, there is an upset, a mini-upset, or a quasi-upset, the apple cart is turned over, and those who remain go on their merry way to engage in more traditional politicking, hoping to remove the stench of the unwashed masses from their $75 hairdos in time for the sorts of interactions with which they are far more comfortable. It is different now. The courtship has turned into a relationship. After all of the suitors came and went and the daughter is smitten, even if the father wishes the happy couple would just get out of the damned house already. But there are four Electoral College votes to be won, and in this day and age, four votes in the Electoral College are not to be taken lightly.

What happened to conservative, reliable, Republican New Hampshire? It may always have been something of a fiction. I have in recent years come to the conclusion that New Hampshire is full of irascible, independent-minded folks who are perhaps more Libertarian than most have previously understood. After all,"Live Free or Die" does not exactly lend itself to big government conservatism, invasive conservatism, any more than it does to big government liberalism. Surely Kerry’s neighboring status is having some effect on the state, but that did not help hapless Michael Dukakis, and this trend was one of the subplots of 2000 when Tennessean Al Gore faced off against President Bush in any case.

But I also think that New Hampshire’s being in play as much as anything shows just how different George W. Bush’s Republicanism is from that which practically got Ronald Reagan beatified and even that which won the state for George H.W. Bush in 1988. From the crusty New Hampshire perspective, George Bush wants to spend their money to send their kids to war, to tell them with whom they should be able to sleep, to tell them how to educate their kids. They did not think of Ronald Reagan as telling them what to do. They certainly did not see Ronald Reagan telling them what to do while enforcing it with their money. This does not answer everything, of course, and if I were to bet, I’d say that the president will end up taking New Hampshire’s four votes. But even if Republicans take those hard-fought Electoral College votes, they can no longer, as it says on the tee shirts, “take New Hampshire for Granite.”