Local favourite Mitt Romney looks like shoo-in in Republican primary, writes LARA MARLOWEin Concord
NEW HAMPSHIRE is a different world from Iowa, as Rick Santorum, the ultra-conservative former senator who virtually tied with Mitt Romney in the Iowa caucuses on January 3rd, learned when a college student challenged him for opposing same-sex marriage.
Mr Santorum says he doesn’t hate homosexuals, only “homosexual acts”. Eight years ago, he opposed lifting state bans on homosexuality on the grounds that this would foster bigamy, polygamy and incest. “If you’re not happy unless you’re married to five other people, is that okay?” he asked in his exchange with the college students, who booed him.
“Iowa Republicans don’t often talk to New Hampshire Republicans,” says Dante Scala, who heads the political science department at the University of New Hampshire. “Every four years, (when the New Hampshire primary follows shortly after the Iowa caucuses), New Hampshire Republicans look at Iowa Republicans and sigh and say, ‘Oh, those people.’ ”
As Mr Santorum’s experience with the college students showed, the shift from the God-fearing midwest to the state with the lowest church attendance in the US can be jolting. Mr Romney will receive 40 per cent of the vote in the January 10th primary, according to the latest Suffolk University/7News tracking poll. Congressman Ron Paul trails at a distant 17 per cent, with Mr Santorum at 11 per cent, Newt Gingrich at 9 per cent and Jon Huntsman at 8 per cent.
Mr Romney’s near-certain victory in no way diminishes the importance of the primary, says Prof Scala: “New Hampshire Republicans have a lot of leverage, because their guy, Mitt Romney, will be the nominee, not the guy supported by the midwestern and southern right. New Hampshire Republicans see Mr Romney as bucking the tide . . . They’re the moderate wing of the Republican party that doesn’t want the Tea Party to take over.” Once upon a time, northeastern, liberal Republicans were a powerful force in the party. But in recent decades, power shifted to more southern, more socially conservative, overtly religious and anti-science Republicans.
The 2000s were a demoralising decade for New Hampshire Republicans. They didn’t like the massive budget deficits run up by George W Bush, his obsession with stopping stem cell research or the plunge into the Iraq war. Traditionally a Republican state, New Hampshire voted Democratic in the last two presidential elections. In 2006, at the nadir of Bush’s popularity, they lost the state legislature for the first time in more than a century.
But by the 2010 midterms, Barack Obama had fallen from grace. Issues close to the heart of New Hampshire Republicans came back into fashion: the size and scope of government; government intervention in the economy; Mr Obama’s stimulus package, which New Hampshire residents regarded as a waste of their money. The state has such an aversion to taxation that it levies no income or sales tax.
New Hampshire is also known for its strong tradition of political participation. Van McLeod is a high-ranking state official and the son of Scott McLeod, a former US ambassador to Ireland. “My father died on election day,” he told me. “His last words to my mother were, ‘Did you vote yet?’”
New Hampshire, like Iowa, claims “first in the nation” status. “The primary is the jewel in the crown of our political system,” says Prof Scala. “We defend it to the death. It’s become our birthright.”
New Hampshire residents are notoriously demanding. In an age when politics is dominated by television and social media, voters demand to see candidates in the flesh. “I need to meet you three more times before I make up my mind,” is a standard political joke here.
Independents, who comprise 40 per cent of the electorate, are offered the choice of a Democratic or Republican ballot on election day. Although there is no serious challenge to President Obama for the Democratic nomination, 14 Democrats have paid the $1,000 fee to appear on the ballot, including a comedian who calls himself Vermin Supreme and wears a boot on his head.
The 2012 presidential campaign is already freighted with negativity. A video posted by a group calling itself NHLiberty4Paul – presumably supporters of the Libertarian candidate Ron Paul – repeatedly shows Jon Huntsman, who served as Mr Obama’s ambassador to China, speaking Chinese. “What exactly does Huntsman stand for?” the video asks, before Huntsman morphs into Chairman Mao.
What kind of country ridicules a presidential candidate for learning to speak a foreign language? I asked Mr Huntsman when he spoke to the same college group that booed Rick Santorum.
“It’s stupid,” he told me. “Yeah, I’ve lived overseas four times. I believe our world is a small, inter-connected place. It doesn’t matter if someone wants to poke fun at me for speaking Chinese, but I object when they put pictures of my adopted daughter up to insinuate something.”
In a refreshing departure from the fertility sweepstakes that are a standard feature of the Republican campaign, Mr Huntsman recounted how his adopted Chinese daughter was abandoned in a vegetable market 12 years ago. A second adopted daughter “was left for dead and found before the animals got her” in India. “I have two little girls who are a daily reminder that a lot of people in the world don’t have the advantages we have.”
Candidates in the Republican campaign are clawing to move further to the right of each other, except Huntsman. “Moderate” has become a dirty word; all but Huntsman seek the label of “true conservative”, which Senator John McCain used to anoint Mitt Romney when he endorsed him this week.
Mr Huntsman calls himself a “realist” rather than a centrist. “If you don’t light your hair on fire and don’t have outlandish ideas, you don’t get covered during the primaries,” he told me. “Voters enjoy the circus and theatre until they have to stare down the ballot box, and then they have to decide who will be president of the United States. That’s going to inform a whole lot of decisions.”
Huntsman admits he’s “the underdog” in the New Hampshire primary, but “New Hampshire loves an underdog”, he adds hopefully. The US’s $15 trillion debt was “like a cancer metastasising”. Debt “is going to shipwreck this generation”, he told the college students.
But the deficit of trust by Americans in their politicians was “just as corrosive”. If New Hampshire didn’t have Mitt Romney, the former governor of neighbouring Massachusetts, whom it regards as a favourite son, the state might have paid more attention to Jon Huntsman, Prof Scala said. But Huntsman is the Democrats’ favourite Republican, a little too close to the centre.
In 2008, Mr Romney eagerly embraced the most conservative positions on social issues in the vain hope of seducing religious Republicans. This time, he avoids talking about abortion and same-sex marriage unless he is asked about it. His ambivalence on these questions mirrors that of New Hampshire Republicans.
And when he wants to throw red meat to his Republican audience, he criticises Mr Obama, as when this week he denounced the appointment to a high-level regulatory position as “Chicago-style politics at its worst”. As I was leaving Mr Huntsman’s event with the college students, I overheard a young woman ask her friend, “what do you think of Huntsman?” “I’m frustrated that he doesn’t get more aggressive,” the other young woman replied – a reproach often made of President Obama. In 2012, it seems, Americans want their candidates to be gladiators.