Granite State primary

Leslie Finer

Concord, New Hampshire The people of this northern New England state, otherwise known at this time of Year as the Snowball Factory, have spoken. Some three hundred of the nation's best journalists and television news stars, having Spent a large part of the four million dollars estimated to be the direct inflow of 'tourist dollars' attributed to the primary election campaign, are departing to begin the most significant part of their work : the assessment of the results—a process of sophisticated analysis, a minute inspection of the entrails, which can promote or ruin the chances of the presidential hopefuls.

With another twenty-nine, or possibly thirty, state primary elections to go before the national party conventions in the sum!Tier to choose the presidential candidates, and with over eight months to go before the actual elections in November, it is natural to ask : why all the fuss? What's so sPecial about New Hampshire? And why should it mean make-or-break ?

The questions are even more relevant in the light of some other peculiar features of the Granite State, as New Hampshire is Often called. Its population of some 800,000 is forty-first down the list of the fifty states of the union, its 9304 square miles, wedged like an inconsequential piece of pie between Canada, Vermont and Massachusetts, is the smallest area of all but six other states. New Hampshire's economy, population Mix and political traditions are possibly less typical or 'average' than those of any Other area of the US. Once the Yankee heartland of a farming community, New Hampshire now relies primarily on new industry and tourism (mainly winter sports), in that order. Its mixture of old Yankee !amines, long-entrenched French Canadians and the new tax-shy immigrants who have flooded across the southern border from Massachusetts, and containing less than half of one per cent of blacks, is so Predominantly conservative that, in the last two elections for Governor, they had to go as far south as Georgia to find, in Mr Meldrim Thomson Jr, a Governor rightWing enough for their tastes.

New Hampshire has such a built-in distaste for government of any kind, and for taxes of any kind, that it manages to remain the only state of the fifty without its own income or sales taxes. It tries to make up for the resulting lack of revenue by imposing so-called 'sin taxes' on liquor, horse and dog-racing, and by running the recently-introduced state lottery, the only one in the US, which sells its tickets at special booze and sweepstake kiosks conveniently situated near the toll-gates on the highways at

points of entry and exit. Yet state revenue from these sources is so small compared with more conventional tax yields that New Hampshire ranks fiftieth—last of all—in per capita spending on education.

Add to all this the fact that New Hampshire sends only seventeen of the 3008 delegates of the Democratic convention in New York next July, and only twenty-one of the 2259 delegates to the Republican convention in Kansas City in August, and the importance attached to the New Hampshire primary seems even more puzzling. Yet the fact remains that no politician has been elected President of the United States in the thirty years since the Second World War without first winning the New Hampshire primary.

The chicken-and-egg question is inevitably asked: is the New Hampshire primary an event for saturation coverage by the mass media because it is important, or is it important because of the attention paid ?

The answer, whatever it is, does not change the fact that most politicians who are serious contenders for the Presidency usually feel that New Hampshire is an Everest that must be climbed—simply because it is there. To do badly in the primary can, of course, put paid to a candidate's hopes for good. But few can afford to give up the chance of the enormous boost which comes from doing well. The tricky problem —and this is where the news media pundits come into their own, making rather than reporting the news—is to decide what, in the case of each candidate, constitutes doing well and doing badly.

It is for these reasons that this year's New Hampshire contest has been of extra-special interest, and even more relevant than usual to the final choice of the candidates for President. For neither of the two major parties has a shoo-in candidate whose nomination at the convention is a foregone conclusion. On the Democratic side, the race is wide open between five 'liberals' and, moving right through the spectrum, Milton Shapp, Henry 'Scoop' Jackson and Governor George Wallace who, if only in a

spoiling role, could seriously sway the final result. And, surveying the whole scene from a strictly uncommitted but ever-ready prominence, the respected if somewhat faded figure of Senator Hubert Humphrey whom most people still give a fifty-fifty chance of securing the nomination in a deadlock.

It has been the five 'liberals' on the Democratic side who, by parading before the judges at the New Hampshire beauty contest, have staked most on the result, while those to the right of them are reserving their assault for later primaries. Read ing roughly from right to left, they were Jimmy Carter, peanut farmer and former governor of Georgia, whose success so far has been to appear liberal to the liberals and conservative to the conservatives, Senator Birch Bayh of Indiana, Sargent Shriver, of the Kennedy connection, who was the Democratic candidate for Vice-President in 1972, Representative Morris K. Udall of Arizona, and vaguely Lincoln-like figure popular with many of the younger voters, and Fred Harris, a former Oklahoma Senator who comes closest to down-to-earth socialism in his campaign against privilege and monopoly. Of these five, it would be surprising if at least two did not cry quits, either now as a result of the New Hampshire vote or, more likely, after the Massachusetts primary confirms their lack of steam next week.

But it is on the Republican side that the New Hampshire contest has had most savour and relevance. The contest between the numerous Democrat hopefuls has a long way to go and could end unpredictably— possibly by the drafting of Hubert Humphrey, or even of someone still undiscussed (the names of one or two southern Democrat governors are occasionally whispered by the cognoscenti). It is just conceivable the the Republican contest could also end in the drafting of a surprise candidate (Nelson Rockefeller ? surely not). But the overwhelming likelihood is that the prize must go either to the incumbent president Ford or to his very serious challenger, former California Governor and prior to that Hollywood film actor Ronald Reagan.

It is a startling indication of President Ford's weakness—his failure to make the Presidency indisputably his own since his accidental accession to the office when Nixon fell in 1974—that an alternative Republican choice for President should even be in the running. So strong was Reagan's challenge that. whereas he began the New Hampshire campaign with a general feeling that forty per cent of the vote would keep him strongly in the race, the campaign ended with the general view (generated by Reagan's very own success in establishing his challenge) that whichever of the two Republicans failed to beat the other would be struggling hard to preserve the credibility of his challenge.

That assessment may prove to be wrong. Reagan's kind of politics, especially his attacks on big government and social welfare programmes, are especially well-tuned to the idiosyncrasies of this far from typical state. He still has a long, long way to go and, at every stage, the incumbency (even if not an elected one) must be a great advantage. Nobody could possibly doubt that.

Still, for President Ford, it must be a nasty thought that the only incumbent president to be defeated in a New Hampshire primary was Harry Truman, outvoted by Estes Kefauver in 1952. Earlier in this primary campaign, the Ford camp was playing it cool and suggesting it was unlikely the President, busy running the country, would find time to make a second trip to New Hampshire. That tune quickly changed when reports of Reagan's progress continued to flow in. Fold came smartly for a two-day swing at the end of the campaign, which must have improved his vote considerably. Not that he is any great shakes as an electioneer. Watching him, one would have to admit that his reputation for being slow-witted and uninspiring, and for policies which are hard to distinguish from Reagan's anti-government pro-big-business conservatism, is accurate enough. But, compared with Reagan's glib and often vague posturing, Ford conveys at least a respectable impression of a man who has a seriousness of purpose and a reasonable grasp of his facts.

So, as the pundits and the American public try to sort out what it means all, and to decide whether the dim shape of the next American President is slightly clearer on the horizon, the 400,000-odd voters of New Hampshire, or as many of them who took the trouble to vote, know that once again they have performed the vital function expected of them.

Like some of the lower vertebrates, they will probably expire in this orgiastic act of procreation. For what has happened here may indeed determine who will stand for election to the Presidency next November. But the people who created the candidate are very unlikely to see him again. Their job has been done. And it's an awful long way, in the middle of a busy Presidential campaign, to trek to the wilds of New Hampshire, just for the sake of the four measly electoral votes out of 538 which is all the state, now deserted by TV cameras and star anchormen, can bring to the actual election of a president.