N.H. Voters Prepare to Anoint

John McCain is sweating. He has just downed an entire bowl of three-alarm chili and half a bottle of fizzy water.

Twenty Manchester firefighters are lunching with the Republican presidential hopeful at a long table in the central station’s glassed kitchen, called the fishbowl. It would be a cozy respite from the freezing cold if not for 100 reporters crammed in a corner, staring.

With the nation’s first primary on Tuesday drawing ever closer, McCain is shopping for votes the New Hampshire way--one at a time. The senator from Arizona puts down his spoon and asks in a low purr, any questions?

“I’ve got one,” Firefighter Mike Lawrence pipes up. “How do you like . . .”

The room falls silent. The cameras zoom in for tonight’s sound bite. How does he like--what? The flat tax? Russia’s new president? The threatened deportation of the little Cuban boy?

“How do you like . . . the chili?”

Therein lies the essence of New Hampshire, where a citizen’s sway is off the scales and the ratio of people to political clout is wildly out of proportion. With the Iowa caucuses out of the way and less than a week to go before New Hampshire’s all-important contest, this tiny state of 1.2 million--one-thirtieth the population of California and roughly the size of San Diego proper--has assumed its place at the center of U.S. politics.

No candidate since 1952 has won the White House without first winning his party’s primary in the Granite State--except in 1992, when next-door-neighbor Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts beat Bill Clinton. (“An aberration,” one local insisted, “and everyone should just forget it.”)

It is here that working-class people have regularly humbled political aristocrats, creating a searing photo album of electoral gaffes: Former Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander flubbing a question on the price of milk. Maine Sen. Edmund Muskie shedding a tear (or was that just a melting snowflake?) over a newspaper attack on his wife. Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. exaggerating his law school performance.

So many presidential wannabes have paraded through the nation’s sixth-smallest state that the novelty wore off years ago. To New Hampshirites, the quadrennial procession is a call to duty. So they drive for miles to town hall meetings and campaign stops, dropping their Rs and firing the sorts of questions voters in Kansas or California never get the chance to ask.

This is the real fishbowl.

“Where did yah go on vacation? What’s yah favorite doughnut? What kind of cah do you drive?”--they want to know, less interested in the answer than the way the response is delivered.

“You can’t come into New Hampshire in an imperial way,” warns Secretary of State Bill Gardner. “You’ve gutta come in as a regular person, a candidate who goes into the living rooms. That’s the way it’s done he-yah.”

If the rest of the country learns its politics from television, New Hampshire learns it from kitchen coffees and rallies at the high school gym. Voters get close--close enough to notice that McCain could use a haircut, that George W. Bush doesn’t always look you straight in the eye, that Al Gore has a big bald spot in the back.

“Bush’s father was president, so he thinks he has it hands down,” firefighter Danny Goonan says, noting that it took a while before the Texas governor started paying homage to the state. “A lot of people don’t like that attitude here.”

Evidently not. In the rest of the nation, Bush is the runaway favorite among Republicans. In New Hampshire, he and McCain are neck-and-neck.

It would be easier to find a dinosaur in the state capital of Concord than a voter who hasn’t shaken the hand of a presidential candidate; according to a recent state survey, 1 in 5 has. If you haven’t met a candidate in New Hampshire, it’s because you didn’t want to.

A win in New Hampshire, or even a good showing, can make a front-runner invincible and lift a dark horse from obscurity. Which helps explain why candidates shamelessly pander for the affections of its voters.

When Linda Kaiser of Amherst accidentally ran over the family’s black sheep dog while rushing out to pick up ice for a meet-and-greet last summer, then-GOP candidate John R. Kasich, an Ohio congressman, stayed for the backyard burial. In 1996, Republican candidate Steve Forbes was so eager for weekend coverage by New Hampshire’s only statewide television outlet, he offered to have one of his daughters baby-sit for the station’s chief political correspondent.

It is the sort of personal attention New Hampshire has come to expect.

As the old saw goes:

Q: Have yah made up yah mind yet?

A: Nope. I’ve only met the candidate three times.

N.H.: One of a Kind

The air is smoky at Mike Libby’s Pub in Durham, where McCain disciples have assembled to watch GOP candidate debate No. 7 on the big screen. New Hampshire’s population is 98% white, and so is virtually everybody in this bar. A lot of them hunt, are rabidly opposed to taxes and are so frugal they haul their own trash to the dump on Saturday mornings rather than pay the city to do it.

At a glance, New Hampshire hardly seems emblematic of the rest of the nation--it was one of the last two states to proclaim a Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, remains one of only two with no sales or income tax and was one of the last to lift the ban on gay adoptions. Eighty-five percent of the state is covered with trees. New Hampshire is so small, a single area code suffices. (Plans for a second have been roundly booed.)

Yet every presidential election season, New Hampshire weeds out the crowded field of candidates, sending its victors off to court the rest of the country and its losers to the political junk heap.

“I’m counting the minutes until the New Hampshire primary so we can get past the grotesque obsession with the media-coddled citizens of that marginal state,” seethed social critic Camille Paglia. “New Hampshire’s tyranny over national politics must end.”

The Live Free or Die state has fought bitterly to hold the leadoff spot it initially won by default and has jealously guarded since 1920. It is a role New Hampshire has come to cherish. State law dictates its primary must be first by at least seven days. A kiosk at Manchester Airport declares “Always First, Always Right,” a motto that remains unchanged despite that little mishap with Clinton.

It isn’t that New Hampshire thinks it is smarter than its 49 siblings, just more practiced. An election is always happening somewhere.

The 400-member state Legislature is the largest in the nation and fourth-largest in the world. (If California had the same ratio of lawmakers to residents, the 120-member Legislature would exceed 10,000.)

The governor is selected every two years, not four. Its 224 towns elect everybody from the clerk to the library trustee. Its size makes hand-to-hand campaigning possible, and voters generally distrust paid advertising; Forbes spent more than $4 million on commercials in 1996 and finished fourth.

“Just about everyone in New Hampshire has either held a public office or someone in their family has,” Gardner says. “Does that make New Hampshire better? No. But there is something different about the state’s heritage and size.”

To the unenlightened, New Hampshire equals “hick.” But the state’s vital statistics defy that bumpkin stereotype. It boasts the country’s eighth-fastest-growing economy, with a per capita concentration of high-technology workers that outstrips even California. It is, at once, a sophisticated exurb of Boston and a pastoral cousin of neighboring Vermont, so rural in the far north that some farms still raise all their own food.

It has little violent crime, ranking 48th among the states, and comparably few teen pregnancies, ranking 49th. A national survey on children’s well-being rated it first for two years running. The schools are considered excellent, although many towns are too cheap to pay for kindergarten. (“If one through eight was good enough for me. . . .”)

Government authority is extremely diffuse. At annual town hall meetings residents comb every line of the budget. Is another street light worth 20 bucks a month? “I’ve been down they-ah in the dahk and I could see just fine. . . .”

Voters approach their illustrious primary with a similar zeal for detail that can seem obsessive, even surly.

“There is a misconception that the New Hampshire voter is cantankerous, contrarian and arbitrarily mean,” said Carl Cameron, the former chief political correspondent for Manchester’s WMUR-TV. “They’re not. They know they have a unique obligation to test the mettle of the would-be president. No other state does that.”

Many Decide in Voting Booth

Back at the Manchester firehouse, McCain is gone. A handful of firefighters is doing dishes and talking politics. They liked the candidate, but they aren’t sure they’ll vote for him. There is still plenty of time to decide; many New Hampshire minds are made up in the voting booth, and those registered as independents have the luxury of choosing to cast their ballot in either the Republican or Democratic races.

Independents make up the largest single voter bloc in New Hampshire--37%, compared to 36% registered Republicans and 27% registered Democrats. And tracking some Granite State voters on the ideological spectrum can cause motion sickness. One man who voted for Clinton last time is for McCain this time and hates Bush so much (“an empty suit that noise comes out of”) he’d vote for liberal Democrat Bill Bradley first.

Now firefighter Andy Parent, who made the chili, is being interviewed by German television, which no one here finds even remotely strange.

A McCain aide, trying to seal the deal, comes back to ask if anybody would like to tour the campaign bus. The firefighters happily file out and climb aboard. The bus is empty. No McCain. A couple of empty doughnut boxes. The firefighters have just spent an entire lunch with him, but in New Hampshire, it’s never enough.

“Well that was thrilling,” one mumbles under his breath as he walks back to the station. “I thought he was gonna be there.”

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New Hampshire Profile

New Hampshire’s political importance overshadows its place as the nation’s sixth smallest state. Since 1952, no candidate has won the White House without first winning his party’s primary in the Granite State--except in 1992, when Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts beat Bill Clinton.

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Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Associated Press