For many Americans the New Hampshire primary holds a certain sentimental appeal. We may know that elections these days are really won through behind-the-scenes political manoeuvrings and high-budget media blitzes, funded largely by contributions from corporations and other special interests. But every four years, for a few weeks or months, we get to revel in the illusion that grassroots, town square democracy actually exists in the United States, as campaign buses drive around the state through the picturesque snow-covered bridges and old mill towns, and candidates who usually communicate with voters only through television screens put on their boots and parkas to shake hands, kiss babies, and chat with folk in local diners, churches, and union halls.
The plain-spoken, nobody's fool Yankees who live here only add to the charm - never mind that with a population that's 96% white, they bear little resemblance demographically to the contemporary United States.
When we spoke to Arne Arnesen, the spitfire talkshow host and 1992 Democratic candidate for governor, she explained how geography, local political culture and tradition shaped this unique political arena. It's no wonder that the locals like to make the most of all this. Many New Hampshire residents have genuinely come to see themselves as important protectors of American democracy. Living in a small, often overlooked state, they must also enjoy the prospect of possible future presidents vying to join them at their kitchen tables for a cup of coffee, and throwing vast amounts of energy and funds into winning their votes. (In 2004, 48% of the TV spending by candidates went to the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.) This is not to mention the boatloads of money the primary brings in to local businesses as thousands of campaign workers and journalists flock to the state. This disproportionate influence is, of course, precisely what the larger states resent - and precisely why New Hampshire will do anything to stay first in the nation. Locals even tend to eschew the growing media attention paid to the Iowa caucuses. "The people of Iowa pick corn, the people of New Hampshire pick presidents," said then-governor John Sununu in 1988.
But do they? The politicians of New Hampshire might like to have you believe that from the time of the American revolution the state was destined to set the course for the nation's leadership. But the first time the New Hampshire primary really made a splash was in 1952, when it catapulted Dwight D Eisenhower ahead of his favored Republican opponent, and crushed incumbent Harry S Truman, who then decided not to run for a third term.
Another incumbent Democratic president was brought down in New Hampshire in 1968. That year, the little-known anti-Vietnam war candidate Eugene McCarthy, bolstered by teams of college students, organized by such canny operatives as Dick Goodwin and Seymour Hersh, pushed the Minnesota senator into the limelight, and within a few points of Lyndon Johnson, who also withdrew from the race as a result.
In 1980 the New Hampshire primary crushed the hopes of a future president, rather than a current one. George Herbert Walker Bush, whose father, Prescott Bush, had been a longtime moderate Republican senator from nearby Connecticut, had served by turn as member of Congress, Nixon's bag man in the Watergate affair, head of the CIA, and ambassador to China. He was widely viewed as just another loyal party henchman, until the early inside-the-Beltway Republican favorite, Senate majority leader Howard Baker, flopped in Iowa, and politicians began to warm to the upstart Bush. But the salt-of-the-earth New Hampshire voters, like many of the party's conservatives, didn't trust the prep school boy turned Texas oilman; they preferred the Hollywood actor turned patrician statesman Ronald Reagan, who unveiled his supply side economics and blazed his trail to the presidency with a town hall tour through the snows of New Hampshire.
Eventually George Bush pere would get his four years in office - but New Hampshire would strike him another blow in 1992, when he was beaten in the primary by Pat Buchanan in an attack from the right. The defeat would mark Bush as a loser when he ran against Bill Clinton. And 1992 would also mark the end of New Hampshire's run of choosing, in one primary or the other, the man who would eventually sit in the Oval Office. That year New Hampshire voters picked local Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas over Clinton, then an obscure southern governor who had been branded a pot-smoking, draft-dodging womanizer.
The state once again failed to pick a winner in 2000, when John McCain took his "Straight Talk Express" across New Hampshire and achieved a substantial primary victory over George W Bush. The momentum McCain gained in New Hampshire was quickly halted by a down-and-dirty campaign in South Carolina, which included rumors that the Arizona senator had a black love child. Which just goes to show that these days, presidential campaigns may begin in the quaint, snowy villages of New Hampshire, but they are bound to end up somewhere far less picturesque.
