LIVE FREE OR CRY

To measure the evolution of political analysis in the last 30 years, consider Walter Shapiro’s recent lament in USA Today, a few months before the 1996 N ew Hampshire primary. “New Hampshire is perhaps the most atypical state in the union,” Shapiro wrote, worrying over its lack of racial diversity and cosmopoli tan sophistication. “Why have we ceded the lead role i n choosing a president to a state where any meal ordered after 9 p.m. is called breakfast?”

What we have here, then, is an old lament about New Hampshire’s all- important role in selecting our presidents, a lament that echoes from those second-growth woods every four years at precisely this point in the election cycle. But there are also those who consider the New Hampshire primary a symbol of democratic purity, a throwback to an earlier era before presidential politics was brought low by the flimflam of consultants and media magicians. In the snows of New Hampshire, the happy legend has it, flinty-eyed rustics $ Igo mano a mano with the men who would be president.

These two opposing views are wrong, and for the same reason. Both accept the myth of New Hampshire exceptionalism — the belief that the New Hampshire primary is somehow unique in late-20th-century American democracy. It’s true, of course, that New Hampshire is atypical — smaller and whiter and ideologically more right-wing than the country at large. And it’s true that America’s method of selecting presidents has grown increasingly trivial and degrading since the first presidential preference primary was held here in 1952.

But Shapiro should cheer up. (So should Alsop, but he’s dead.) Because when it comes to American presidential politics, the New Hampshire primary is just as degrading and trivial as everything else.

If there is any truth to the myth of New Hampshire exceptionalism, it lies in the miniature scale of the state and its politics. The primary is like a little toy election, a few levels of complexity above a student council contest in a large suburban high school. Registered voters number fewer than 600,000. The state capitol boasts a single full-time statewide officeholder, and he’s the governor.

Those who despair that so small a state carries such disproportionate influence over our political fate should know that things are even worse than they seem: The great mass of New Hampshire’s political power is found in a triangle far smaller than the tip of Long Island (except without A1 D’Amato). More than 70 percent of the votes are cast in an area that runs from Rochester in the east, to Concord in mid-state, then down to Nashua along the the Massachusetts border. A candidate certain of doing well here can safely forget the rest of the state, especially the mountainous, sparsely settled North Country, which is quickly accessible only by plane. This concentrates campaigning, and this in turn pleases out-of-state reporters, who can attend a half-dozen events with three different candidates in a single day and still get back to the hotel in time for Friends.

The politics are more concentrated even than this. By tradition, the various primary headquarters are located within a few blocks of one another in downtown Manchester. Across from the state capitol in Concord the Republican party headquarters is next door to the regional office of Congressman Charles Bass, which is next door to the Democratic party headquarters, which is across the street from the office of Senator Judd Gregg. (Senator Bob Smith’s state office is in Manchester, next door to Lamar Alexander’s campaign headquarters and one floor down from the studios of WMUR, the only statewide television station.)

Most New Hampshire politicos estimate that the state’s parties are animated by 1,500 activists, 2,000 tops. These are the phone-bank operators, the envelope lickers, the lawn-sign planters — the grunts of the political wars. The candidate newly arrived in New Hampshire will have to activate these activists, and that can be a disorienting experience for a senator or governor. For he will soon discover that unlike most campaigns for national office, few layers of authority separate him from that talky, overeager volunteer who has been enlisted to drive him from event to event. And to enlist this volunteer, our candidate will first have had to enlist a poobah, a warlord, a New Hampshire potentate, of whom, by most estimates, there are fewer than 100, mostly self-appointed.

Wayne Vetter is not self-appointed; he is an authentic poobah. “When you meet Wayne Vetter,” a state politician says, “you are meeting one of the most powerful men in this state, politically.” To meet Vetter you take State Road 101 east out of Manchester for about 20 miles, then turn onto an unmarked road and drive another few miles through those second-growth woods that so alarmed Stewart Alsop. When you come to a series of barns on your left, you turn right down a long driveway until you see a brick building with slit windows fenced off with concertina wire. This is the county detention facility — what used to be known as a jail — and one of New Hampshire’s most powerful politicos is in his office up there on the second floor.

Wayne Vetter is High Sheriff of Rockingham County and former president of the state sheriffs” association. New Hampshire has ten sheriffs, nine of them Repub licans. Sheriffs are poobahs ex officio. Each must run for reelection every two years and is thus required to keep his “organization” — his personal rolodex of phone bankers and envelope lickers and door-to-door solicitors — well-oiled. Vetter himself is known especially for his ability to mobilize the fellows who brave the cold to plant campaign signs in their neighbors’ yards or staple them to telephone poles along highways and town streets. “They call me “Signs” Vetter,” he says, with some modesty. “We had the governor down here last year, and Jesus, he couldn’t believe the signs we had. They were everywhere.”

As he sits in his cinderblock office, in a starched white shirt and handsome glen plaid suit, Sheriff Vetter wears his power lightly. But the color photos propped on the credenza of himself with a smiling President Bush testify that the power is real enough. Only a dolt would think he could be president without running in the New Hampshire primary, and only a dolt would compete in the primary without first beseeching the aid of”Signs” Vetter.

“Lamar? Sure we met. His guy called me and we chatted up in Manchester. This was early in the year. Maybe last year. A very, very nice man. But…” His voice trails off. “I don’t quite understand what the message is.

“Steve Forbes, we got together over at the Deerfield Fair, not long ago. Just a super guy. I think he might pick up some of the Wilson people, now that Pete’s dropped out. Of course, there weren’t that many…

“Phil Gramm was probably the first to call. This would have been the fall of “94. Called me at home, on a Saturday night. Now, I like Phil. He asked me to get together a few of the guys, some of the other sheriffs. I’ve been fortunate over the years to get these guys together and kind of lead them, you know. Sheriffs are the number-one vote getters in this state. They’ll get more votes than Ronald Reagan in some cases.

“So I arranged this breakfast with Phil and the guys. And he’s got all these facts and figures. He says to us, “I’ve got 44,000 contributors. I’ve raised $ 12 million-more than all the other candidates combined.’ That stuck with me. It’s impressive. And he says, “So here’s how I’m going to win,” and he lays it all out for US.

“Well, when I get back to the off’Ice, I swear the phone rings and it’s the guy who runs Dole’s campaign calling me. I tell him, “You’re not going to believe where I’ve just come from.” And I tell him what Gramm’s been telling us. He tells me, “What he didn’t tell you was that $ 6 million of that $ 12 million he’s transferred over from the Gramm Senate campaign.” And of course Gramm didn’t tell us that. He misled us. Just like that. It was all money, money, here’s how I’m going to win. So I don’t know. There’s something about Phil…”

It was Bob Dole who eventually won Wayne Vetter’s heart, and, by extension, the hearts of the other nine Republican sheriffs in New Hampshire.

“I wanted to meet with Dole personally, to settle some issues,” says Vetter. “This was before my endorsement. I wanted to give everyone an opportunity. So Dole calls and he asks my wife and I to join he and Elizabeth for dinner. Which we did. Elizabeth is a super gal, by the way.”

The issues on Vetter’s mind were, first, the Clinton crime bill, which Vetter calls a “fraud,” and second, Medicare. “This is an issue important for us,” he says, “because of my wife’s parents, and my own mother.” In their private meeting, which lasted more than an hour, “Signs” outlined his concerns to the majority leader of the United States Senate. The result is really no surprise: “I was glad to see that his thoughts are exactly the same as mine on these issues.

“But what sold me was just sitting down with him and seeing that this is one heck of an individual.”

Vetter went to work on the other sheriffs, the county prosecutors, and the state representatives wht) circulate in his orbit. There will be no shortage of lawn signs for Bob Dole come February 20.

Back in Washington, some Beltway-bound campaign consultants don’t look kindly on New Hampshire poobahs and what some would consider their imperious ways. The animus is directed less at the sheriffs than at the statewide politicos — a motley of affluent lawyers, former officeholders, current officeholders, and political operatives whose reputations are refurbished every four years.

“It’s like the old Kremlin and the Soviet politburo,” says one Washington consultant. “All these backroom maneuvers. Andropov wouldn’t last a minute with these guys. Their single operating principle is how to keep the franchise going, which is what their reputations depend on. They know one thing, which is New Hampshire politics — knowledge that is absolutely worthless except for one 10-month period every four years.”

“They’re all big fish in the littlest pond in American politics,” says anothe r Washington veteran. “And these consultants, they can’t deliver s — . All the y can do is talk on the p hone to each other.”

But they do know, from long experience, how to talk to the press. On the record, they boom their candidate, in 10-second chunks of quotable matter perfectly shaped for a reporter on deadline. Off the record, they trash their colleagues.

One New Hampshire Dole backer said of Alexander’s team: “Oh, they’re real experts. You know what they’re experts at? Talking to the press. But they wouldn’t know a voter’s list if it bit “em in the ass.”

“Losers,” is how one Gramm man described his opposites in the Dole camp. ” Did wonders for Kemp in “88, didn’t they?”

“A very nice guy,” said an Alexander man of a rival. “His only problem is he’s insane.”

As in academic politics, New Hampshire rivalties are so vicious because the stakes are so low. Power within the state itself is diffuse by design. The state’s top political office, the governorship, is one of the weakest in the country. The governor must stand for reelection every two years. Patronage is almost non- existent. His power is shared with a five-member council, and below that is a yammering assembly of legislators — 400 in the state house of representatives, 24 in the state senate.

As a consequence, the few statewide offices worth holding — the governorship, the state’s two congressional seats, and its two U.S. Senate seats — rotate in a mortal combat of musical chairs. All are held now by Republicans. The former governor, Judd Gregg (son of another former governor), is now a senator. The state’s current governor, Steve Merrill, is rumored to want the other Senate seat, now held by Bob Smith. The senior congressman, Bill Zelliff, is said to want Merrill’s job. And according to several politicos, everyone would be more than happy to challenge everyone else in the appropriate primary.’The picture is complicated by each pol’s presidential endorsement. Smith has been weakened by his endorsement of Gramre, who is tanking in the polls, which makes Smith more vulnerable to Zelliff, who is strengthened for having endorsed frontrunner Dole early. And Merrill is weakened for having endorsed Dole late. If you can keep all this straight.

Of course, there’s no reason why you should want to. The interest New Hampshire holds for observers of national politics resembles the power once held by the Soviet Union. Without its nuclear weapons, the USSR was just Albania with elephantiasis. Without its first-in-the-nation primary, New Hampshire is just Vermont with Republicans.

First-in-the-nation: In New Hampshire, this is a single word. For several elections now, the state has shared F-I-T-N status with the Iowa caucuses, held ten days before the New Hampshire primary, but those are caucuses. New Hampshire’s primary primacy is enshrined in state law, which dictates that it be held “on the Tuesday immediately preceding the date on which any other state shall hold a similar election.” Since 1952, when the primary was held in late March, the date has been pushed farther and farther forward as other states try to horn in on New Hampshire’s cherished possession. Delaware was the most recent interloper, late in 1995, when it proposed to hold a primary, not before New Hampshire’s, but four days afterward. The near-violent dispute between the two tiny, insignificant states was like a rumble between the Lullaby League and the Lollipop Guild. New Hampshire won in the end. Its secretary of state asked all the candidates to sign a pledge not to campaign in Delaware — a bit of Yankee mau-mauing that proved amazingly successful, as every would-be president except Gramm and Forbes agreed.

New Hampshirites are understandably obsessed with their F-I-T-N vulnerability, and the obsession is perfectly reflected in the only two statewide media outlets, the Manchester Union Leader and WMUR-TV.

From the days of its ferociously right-wing editor William Loeb, who died in 1981, the Union Leader has been ascribed heroic powers of persuasion by the reporters who alight here every primary season. In the myth of New Hampshire exceptionalism, the Union Leader looms over political life as a behemoth: cranky and biased in its news columns, enormously influential in its editorials. In fact it is neither. Such influence as it has among its 70,000 daily subscribers appears to be almost wholly negative. Its endorsements over the last several elections have included Pete DuPont in 1988, John Ashbrook in 1972, and Pat Buchanan in 1992 — a gallery of losers.

Still the presidential candidates make a quadrennial pilgrimage to the home o f the paper’s publisher, Loeb’s widow Nacky, in the bucolic village of Goffstow n, outside Manchester. Bob Dole made his oblations last summer, seeking her end orsement. “I think he really thought he had a chance,” chuckles Joe McQuaid, th e paper’s editor. Heh-heh. Mrs. Loeb responded by endorsing Buchanan and now bl asts Dole routinely as an ideological squish in her front-page editorials. “The endorsement won’t help Buchanan, but the rel entless trashing can hurt Dole,” says one New Hampshire reporter. “After the Union Leader has decided to endorse somebody else, the best you can hope for if you’re a candidate is for them to ignore you.”

The state’s most prominent political reporter is Carl Cameron, who has achieved his stature by virtue of being the only full-time political reporter at WMUR. The candidates know him by sight, seek his advice, phone him at home. I chatted with him in the state capitol, outside the secretary of state’s tiny office, while we waited for Richard Lugar to show up and formally file his papers as a presidential candidate.

“New Hampshire reporters have a special expertise,” he said. “You go to Raleigh-Durham, reporters there can tell you everything there is to know about the Blue Devils. You come here, reporters can tell you everything about politics. It’s our local sport.”

Cameron is a self-possessed man with the sleepy air of someone immune to surprise. “With all due respect, it is almost impossible to scoop us on this,” he continued. “For example: We’ve covered Lugar every time ‘he’s come up here, and he’s been coming up here since ’92. If the syndicated columnists and the newsweeklies come up here and all of a sudden discover that Lugar is not getting a response from voters, that’s their big story. Well, excuse me, we had that story 18 months ago.”

As he spoke Lugar suddenly appeared, among a New Hampshire-sized entourage of four people. He shot straight toward Cameron. Lugar is known for his decorousness but for a moment he looked as if he were ginning himself up to give a big hug. Cameron gave him a sleepy stare. So Lugar merely grabbed the reporter’s hand and pumped it. “It’s the recorder of all deeds!” Lugar said enthusiastically, pumping like crazy. “Good to see you, my friend!”

Cameron nodded and escorted the candidate into the secretary of state’s office, where a group of local reporters had gathered around a table for a press conference. Lugar sat down and immediately subjugated himself. “I want to announce,” he said, “that I will not be filing as a candidate in Delaware. I want to do what I can to protect the historical integrity of a process that has worked well.”

The reporters looked more than satisfied and then uncorked their own questions. Was Dole slipping in the polls? Is he being hurt by the “age issue”? How does the senator account for the nasty rhetoric of this campaign? Can he raise enough funds to continue a plausible campaign? What about organization?

And so on. New Hampshire voters thrive on issues, like no other voters in America — or so the exceptionalists say. And reporters in New Hampshire match their readers in sophistication — or so it is said. It’s interesting to note, then, that every question was what professionals call a “process” question, involving matters of strategy and tactics, rather than a “substance” question, referring to the candidate’s “stand on the issues.”

Then again, it may be that in New Hampshire the reporters had the “substance” story 18 months ago and are bored already.

Give them the benefit of the doubt: Perhaps New Hampshire voters truly are wondering whether Dick Lugar has the fundraising capacity to go the distance. According to the myth, they are no-nonsense individualists, anti-tax libertarians trying to shrug off over-weening government, who proudly brandish the state’s license-plate motto “Live Free or Die.” “These are very sophisticated voters who take this very seriously,” says Tom Rath, a Concord lawyer who has worked in several presidential primary campaigns.

“The primary is an ongoing civics lesson, and people learn about the issues and get to know the candidates.” New Hampshirites love to repeat the gag about the voter who’s undecided because he’s only met each candidate twice.

This is the “retail politics” of New Hampshire lore, and indeed New Hampshirites do have a chance to see the candidate in the flesh if they’re so inclined. Like their fellow voters everywhere, though, they mostly watch TV. ” You can work every coffee shop in the state,” says one New Hampshire pol, ” meet every voter, but if your opponent has a good media buy, he can wipe you out in a week.” Steve Forbes, who has scarcely resorted to retail politics, has instead bought hundreds of thousands of dollars in TV ads. From nowhere he has risen to second place in the polls, outdistancing, among others, Lamar Alexander, who made a celebrated walk across the state, retailing all the way.

Nor are New Hampshirites immune to the other infections of modern politics. During the second week of December a cold snap hit the state, and even the primary news in the Union Leader and on WMUR was pushed aside by the public outcry.

And for what did the flinty libertarians cry out? Federal aid. “Federal Budge t Battle Is Leaving State’s Towns and Struggling Elderly, Needy Out in the Cold ,” griped the Union Leader. With budget negotiations in abeyance, the state’s u sual heatin g-oil subsidies from the feds had been delayed, and New Hampshirites weren’t happy. Local pols, from congressmen to the governor, bragged about the pressure they were applying to Washington so the dollars could flow once again — so the individualists could once again cash their federal checks. The perfect New Hampshire presidential candidate would cut taxes, balance the budget, rail against the intrusions of the federal government, and double the subsidies for home heating oil.

Every state in the union could yield a similar example of voter self- delusion, of course. Which is the point about the New Hampshire myth. It all sounds so familiar: voters who hate government until the checks are due, reporters obsessed with trivialities, consultants and politicos elbowing for position and using campaigns for their own aggrandizement. Is it fair to subject our presidential candidates to the indignities of New Hampshire politics as a pre-condition for winning the White House? This is the question that feature writers wrestle with every four years, from Stewart Alsop to Walter Shapiro, and unless you have some unaccountable sympathy for presidential candidates, the answer is: You bet. New Hampshire may be small; and in some respects “atypical.” But no matter what its detractors or admirers say, it is American politics, the perfect boot camp for the president of the last best hope of earth.

By Andrew Ferguson