COLUMN LEFT/ ALEXANDER COCKBURN : Is It Against the Rules to Make Sense? : In New Hampshire, one party belies its self-reliant creed while the other competes in vagueness.

Having read so much about recession-torn New Hampshire, I half-expected, at the border crossing from Vermont, to encounter scenes reminiscent of the ci-devant Soviet Union: throngs clamoring for bread, Jeffrey Sachs handing out pamphlets about the joys of a cauterizing plunge into the free market, whiskered peasants lofting icons of George III.

What actually was on display among the shuttered stores and empty malls of Manchester was Pat Buchanan, Bush’s conservative opponent, pledging to a group of hard-core unemployed that he would never raise their taxes. This surreal spectacle accurately symbolized the vacuity of most campaign rhetoric in the Granite State.

Start with the Granite State itself. Year after year the Republicans who rule here have preached the glories of rugged self-reliance, freedom from the dead hand of government--above all, freedom from the yoke of state income and sales taxes.

Deep in recession at the start of this year, the state found itself facing a deficit of about $200 million on its biennial budget. The Republicans, led by Gov. Judd Gregg, searched their hearts for traces of self-reliance, found none and opted instead to loot the nation’s Medicaid fund, tricking the federal government into reimbursing the state for Medicaid funds that were never actually spent.

Here’s how the scam works. The state of New Hampshire, which already taxes hospital receipts at 8%, adds a $250 million annual surcharge. It then returns the money to the hospitals, while filing with the feds for reimbursement of a hefty slice of that nonexistent expense.

So now New Hampshire is getting $234 million in federal reimbursements over the next two years, which will wipe out its deficit and save having to pay for services through state taxes. The bill is passed on to taxpayers across the country. Other states have used this loophole, now closing, but at least they didn’t plunder the Treasury with one hand while pounding their chests with the other about thrifty self-reliance.

Self-serving nonsense from the Republicans is matched by the flummery offered to New Hampshire voters by the leading Democrats. Much of Tom Harkin’s economic plan is based on a vast “peace dividend,” but he never mentions the fact that for every contractor repairing bridges over the interstate highways (this is what “repairing infrastructure” mostly comes down to in practice) there’s an out-of-work aerospace engineer in Redondo Beach.

Are we supposed to reckon the 14,000 workers now scheduled for layoff by United Technologies as part of a “peace bonus?” The only way such a bonus could happen is if there was a national plan, with public money invested and accountable. But no politician dares talk about planning, so we are left with “free market” economics, New Hampshire style.

Iowan Harkin is meant to be the old-style liberal-populist in these primaries. In the television debate held in Manchester last weekend, he promised to deal with drug-exporting countries like Colombia and Peru. Hang around a Democrat long enough and he’ll promise to invade somewhere. But Harkin’s no populist. He doesn’t even dare to attack Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, and his health plan is almost as vague as Bill Clinton’s, a fact perhaps connected to the fact that his state is home to a great many insurance companies.

Bob Kerrey, the senator from Nebraska, does have a decent single-payer health insurance plan but nothing else beyond a puerile pledge to make what he terms a substantial “down payment on the deficit” in his first year, which would ensure continuing recession. Clinton is another merchant of vagueness, and in any case his discussions of economic policy are now starting to revolve around allegations that he put a woman friend on the Arkansas state payroll.

It wouldn’t be fair to leave the press out of this chronicle of posturing and triviality. The TV debate was orchestrated by Cokie Roberts of National Public Radio and ABC. She chose to introduce a discussion of crime by detailing the recent abduction and rape in New York of a 9-year-old by a paroled child molester testing HIV-positive. Would you, Roberts asked each candidate, have paroled this man?

The only one to reject the terms of this absurd interrogation was Jerry Brown, who rightly replied that it was the kind of rhetoric that multiplied hysteria and eroded civil liberties. But then Brown, and Ralph Nader, another outsider who is looking for a write-in vote, are the only people saying anything profound about the corruption of the system. The press takes neither of them seriously.