Obama Visit Shows All Eyes Are Still on New Hampshire
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By Laura Blinkhorn
Congressional Quarterly
December 11, 2006
The New Hampshire primary campaign appears undiminished as a rite of passage for presidential candidates, despite a breakthrough by political activists in other states who have long sought to water down the Granite State’s influence as host of the first-in-the-nation primary.
This was underscored Sunday, when Illinois Sen. Barack Obama — who has had celebrity status within the Democratic ranks since he rocked the house with his keynote address at the party’s 2004 presidential convention in Boston — appeared as guest speaker at what amounted to a victory rally for the resurgent New Hampshire Democratic Party. (C-SPAN will be airing the New Hampshire event on tape at 8 p.m Eastern time Monday night.)
Obama, who won a landslide Senate victory in 2004 and currently is the chamber’s only African-American member, is considering a presidential bid for 2008 and says he will decide soon. And his appearance raised the tally to at least 58 visits to New Hampshire by 13 official, exploring and thinking-about-it Democratic presidential candidates since June 2005.
While Obama soaked up most of the attention, another would-be Democratic hopeful from the Midwest was in New Hampshire this weekend: Indiana Sen. Evan Bayh.
The most conspicuous absence so far: Hillary Rodham Clinton, who has not yet visited the state in the context of the 2008 presidential campaign. The former first lady, who is seen as the early front-runner for the Democratic nomination should she run, played down her presidential interests during a 2006 campaign in New York that delivered her a landslide victory for a second term in the Senate.
New Hampshire certainly will face more competition for attention in the 2008 White House sweepstakes, after more than a half-century of primacy as host of the first-in-the-nation presidential nominating primary and decades of being preceded only by the Iowa caucuses.
The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is interjecting caucuses in Nevada between the Iowa and New Hampshire events, and programming a South Carolina primary shortly after New Hampshire has its say. Party officials are responding to complaints from other states that Iowa and New Hampshire, which have few minority-group residents, are too racially homogenous to represent all interests and viewpoints in the highly diverse party.
But Nevada, like Iowa, is going to be holding caucuses, which tend to draw limited turnout. That means New Hampshire is maintaining its station as the first mass voting event on the calendar, and the candidate pilgrimage continues.
That is also true, and maybe more so, on the Republican side. The Republican National Committee has not indicated whether it will go with the Democrats’ more front-loaded schedule, or leave Iowa and New Hampshire alone at the top of the calendar.
But the Democratic contest may have more portent than usual. New Hampshire voters have tended to be more conservative than those in the rest of New England, and slower to shed its tradition of “Yankee Republicanism.” But the Democrats, after slowly gaining some ground, scored big in 2006, enjoying what could well be described as their most successful year in more than a century.
“It is a great year to be a Democrat,” says New Hampshire Democratic Party communications director Kathleen Strand. Her party won control of the state House and Senate from Republicans — the first time they took both chambers since 1874. Democratic Gov. John Lynch won a second term with a record-breaking 74 percent of the vote.
And, in one of the strongest reflections of the national shift against the Republican Party this year, New Hampshire voters kicked out moderate Republican House incumbents Jeb Bradley and Charlie Bass — both of whom entered their contests as strong favorites — and replaced them with Democrats Carol Shea-Porter and Paul Hodes.
This marked the first time since the 1912 election that New Hampshire gave both of its House seats to Democrats. Shea-Porter also is the first woman to be elected to Congress from New Hampshire.
Presidential hopefuls are already busy currying favor with these new party standard-bearers in New Hampshire.
Shea-Porter received campaign contributions from senators eying the White House, including Clinton, Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware and Christopher J. Dodd of Connecticut; Dodd also attended a Shea-Porter campaign event. Wesley Clark — the former supreme commander of NATO troops in Europe who bid for the 2004 Democratic presidential nod and is considering a 2008 run — also made an appearance for Shea-Porter, who worked on his 2004 campaign. Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin and Virginia Gov. Mark Warner campaigned for her before announcing they would forgo running for president.
Hodes received campaign contributions from Dodd, Clinton, Biden and two other Senate colleagues who are considering 2008 runs: Massachusetts’ John Kerry, who lost as the Democrats’ challenger to President Bush in 2004, and Bayh. Dodd and Biden campaigned for Hodes, according to Reid Cherlin, a spokesman for the congressman-elect.
Dante J. Scala, associate professor of politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester, said the 2008 elections will be crucial in determining whether New Hampshire has become a Democratic stronghold or will remain a highly competitive battleground between between Democrats and Republicans. But Scala added that Democrats are going into the 2008 cycle “confident, aggressive and hopeful.”
Obama certainly helped keep the party’s buzz going. Strand described the Sunday event as “pretty phenomenal,” with tickets selling out in a week. Lynch said Obama could sell more tickets than the Rolling Stones, and Hodes said, “Looking around this stage today, I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather have on our team” leading up to 2008.
Speaking off the cuff, Obama played down his celebrity, saying, “I’ve become a symbol, for now, of a spirit that the last election in New Hampshire represented. It’s a spirit that says, ‘We are looking for something different.’” In his speech, Obama called for universal health care, more higher education loans, redeployment of the troops from Iraq and a policy to address global warming.
Scala said he had “never seen a candidate received as enthusiastically as early before.” He described Obama’s speech as “the most important event in the 2008 presidential elections” in New Hampshire so far, adding that “anything anyone does will be compared to Obama.”
Even more than for most presidential contenders who have marched through New Hampshire, the state would provide a key test for Obama should he decide to run.
One of the longstanding gripes about New Hampshire’s primacy in the nominating process is its unrepresentative population: 95 percent white, 1 percent black. If Obama does well there in a bid to become the first African-American president, it could help him put aside some of the “electability” questions he faces. If he were to do poorly, despite his rock star status, it could be a bad sign for his appeal among white voters.
© 2006 Congressional Quarterly |
