BOB'S SPEECHLESS, SO PAT WINS
Mark Steyn, our film critic, has a home in
New Hampshire: he was there on primary election day
New Hampshire IN THE early hours of primary morning, my town received its first visit from a Pres- idential candidate. There it was, a lone placard plunked in the snow on our pic- ture-perfect clapboard common: 'Lamar Walked Here!' For months, according to the network news, Lamar Alexander, for- mer governor of Tennessee, has been walking across New Hampshire in a red plaid shirt, stopping only to play 'Alexan- der's Ragtime Band' on his electronic key- board. And now, apparently, Lamar had walked here — in my small, northern town of a few hundred Yankee highlanders. `Well, if he walked here, he musta done it in the middle of the night,' scoffed Pat — not Pat Buchanan, but the woman who runs the store and, on a good day, can be even more ferocious. On balance, it seemed more likely that a man with a `Lamar Walked Here!' sign had walked here — and, on closer inspection, the lack of footprints suggested that even he had driven here, pulled over, and dropped the `Lamar Walked Here!' sign into the snow- bank without even getting out of his truck.
But, on television, it was business as usual: 'I want to thank the people of New Hampshire for letting me walk across their state,' said Alexander. Actually, he's walked across a few hundred yards in the southern tip of the state surrounded by cameras and an entourage who look about as comfortable in their regulation red flan- nel shirts (immaculately pressed) as my neighbours would in white tie and tails. When the news crews have enough sound bites, he gets back in the limo and drives on.
Back in the real New Hampshire, at the school gym, Jean, the town clerk, and Dave, the town moderator, were setting up the polling booths and running over the voters' checklist. Outside, our one-man police department was on hand in case, as in Haiti, our zeal for democracy should lead to riots. Across the road from the post office, the town's second and third placards bloomed: 'Dole' and 'Clinton/Gore '96', both in the Copelands' front yard. It was a portent of a worrying trend in disillusioned moderate Republican households: the duti- ful husband resigned to Dole, the disgusted wife figuring better the bozo you know. An hour later, the sole Dole, Clinton and Lamar signs had been joined by dozens for Senator Lugar, all put up by Earl Strout. Earl has a business that makes knick- knacks associated with our state's North Country and fridge magnets which bear our bloodcurdling state motto (`Live Free or Die') and amusing variations thereof ('New Hampshire: Live, Freeze and Die'), and there was some talk as to whether he had the poster concession for the entire Lugar campaign.
In the absence of ABC, CBS, NBC or CNN, I conducted an exit poll: after an hour, it said 'Dole 2, Keyes 1'. Keyes? Don't laugh. Before Iowa, the experts kept telling us that the flat-tax goofball Steve Forbes was a heavyweight candidate: he spent $25 million, got cover stories on Times and Newsweek and everywhere else, and, for all that, wound up only a few hun- dred votes ahead of Alan Keyes, who's broke and of no interest to the press. The Keyes vote was cast by Chris, who heads the town's Keyes Communication Centre. Until last week, she'd headed the town's Phil Gramm campaign, but he pulled out and, frankly, she never much liked him. The day before the primary, she happened to be in Hanover, heard Keyes speak and was bowled over. 'I was amazed,' she said. `I had no idea he was black.'
She went in to vote, so I held her 'Keyes For President' sign. Matt went in to vote, so I held his 'Clinton/Gore '96' sign. Chris's husband came along and said, since I was collecting signs, did I want the 50 useless Phil Gramm ones in his basement?
Traditionally, New Hampshire has been the last stop for 'retail politics' — one-to- one, on-the-ground campaigning before it all comes down to 'media perception'. But this year, for the first time, Granite Staters began to wonder whether they were super- fluous to the process. My neighbour Sally had headed a hundred miles south to take part in several examples of that well- known oxymoron, the 'Dole rally'. 'We'd be in these high schools,' she said, 'and each day there'd be less and less of us, so they'd make the bleachers for the media bigger, and the rest of us would be squashed up so it'd look like there's a real crowd. If we'd gone on another week, we'd've been down to six, and no matter how you squash us up, it's kinda hard to make it much of a crowd.' Dole's cam- paign, she reckons, was a classic case of too many chiefs and not enough Native Americans. 'Every day he'd announce another endorsement from some bigshot — Senator This, Congressman That, Gov- ernor Whosis. Last time I looked, none of 'em had votes in New Hampshire.'
Dole is so indifferent to popular democra- cy that he's been running for the White House for 20 years and still hasn't got a speech. In the end, it was so close that a cou- ple of small towns like mine could have swung it for him, but the poor chump's Pres- idential-level security was so thick he couldn't see there was no one on the other side.
At lunchtime, the Copelands' Dole sign fell into the road and got run over by a log- ging truck. (The logging vote went to Buchanan.) So, by evening, it was a choice between the ancien regime of Dole, the ersatz media populism of Alexander or the genuine arti- cle from Buchanan. While the slick cam- paigns were spin-doctoring themselves around in circles on the big networks, the undoctored, adless Buchanan was winning the north country with all the unglamorous media — the tiny hick radio stations in Berlin and Littleton, to which he was the only candidate who'd give interviews; the Union-Leader newspaper, refreshingly unspoilt by progress, whose old crone of a publisher/editor, Nackey Loeb, wrote pro- Pat front-page leaders day after day.
For 40 years, New Hampshire has cor- rectly predicted every President. But, after failing to vote for Bill Clinton four years ago, we've figured something out: these phoney-baloney Presidents aren't worth predicting. In voting for Buchanan, the Granite State signalled the demise of its own political reputation, but maybe of the modern primary system and its airhead candidates as well.
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