Exeter, Monday, 6 p.m. Not all of the 300 or so who waited for John McCain on the hill in front of Exeter Town Hall were supporters. There was the curious on election eve, many of them young people in a New Hampshire town famous for its good schools. There were Ron Paul supporters, silently holding up their posters. And, there was the media - amongst them a group of nine foreign-born, New York-resident reporters. We'd traveled together to witness the world-famous contest firsthand.
The atmosphere was good-natured and low-key outside the 1855-built structure. New Hampshire was into its January thaw and care had to be taken after dark with snow piled beside pathways. Demarcation lines were strictly adhered to. "Watch the rope," people were warned as they maneuvered for position. "Oh yeah, the rope," they'd say upon seeing it, and turn back. The "rope" was a thin length of twine and despite the state's motto "Live Free or Die," it was as effective as any electronic fence.
Exeter has such deep roots in New England's history that the alleged founding of the United States Republican Party there in 1853 is almost a recent event. That secret meeting of abolitionists in the Squamscott Hotel didn't go anywhere. However, by 1860 the party was up and running when one of its leading members came to visit his son Robert Todd Lincoln, a student at Phillips Exeter Academy.
One has to fast-forward a century for the next really important alleged event. On Sept. 3, 1965, two police officers and a youth said they saw a large strange craft in the sky with red pulsating lights. The "Incident at Exeter" is still up there on the Ufologists' top-10 list. On Jan. 7, 2008, we had to make do with the "Straight Talk Express" for excitement.
Several supporters held aloft "Irish for McCain" posters, which gave me an edge over my colleagues from the Philippines, Lebanon, Bangladesh and other far-flung places. A woman named Florence told me she had some Irish roots, but not enough to hold a poster. She made the pitch anyway. "I liked him eight years ago and I like him now," she said of the winner of the 2000 primary over George W. Bush. "He's the man to get the job done. And he's not too old, thank you. I know I could run the country in 10 years' time."
"He's younger than me," said Warren who was standing within earshot with his wife Therese. He asked me if I'd heard of James Michael Curley, the mayor of Boston. I said I had. He was the inspiration for the novel and film "The Last Hurrah."
"That's right. You know, he'd 'seed' a crowd," Warren said, referring to well-organized plants. An apparently distressed young woman, for example, would relate a tale of woe, and Curley, promising action, would dispatch his aides to her side to take the details.
"He was a great man," he chuckled.
I asked Warren if he was Irish. "Well, I'm Scots Irish," he said. "I'm real Irish," Therese said, trumping her husband. "On both sides. My people came from Galway."
In a state in which about 14 percent claims Irish ancestry (and which boasts towns called Londonderry and Derry) the quintessential Scots-Irishman McCain could always expect a fair hearing. And after stepping into the TV lights outside Exeter Town Hall, he affected the defiance of a Davy Crockett and the belligerence of an Andrew Jackson. Appearing small and almost frail against the backdrop of the town hall's pillars, he promised "to go to the gates of hell to get Osama bin Laden."
Merrimack Restaurant, Manchester
The former POW's foreign policy came up hours earlier when Jehangir Khattak left his lunch table at the Merrimack Restaurant in Manchester to take questions on a Voice of America call-in show broadcast in Pakistan.
"People in the cities have television," he said. "But not in the rural areas." So Voice of America, the BBC World Service and Deutsche Welle are listened to avidly.
"They're very interested in the election because they know change is coming," Khattak told me. "John McCain will be the status quo with more strings attached to what Pakistan is getting.
"But with the Democrats there's bound to be a shift in policy – a shift in focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, which means Pakistan," he said.
There's likely to be an impact internally, too, he argued, as Pakistan's democratic forces believe that a U.S. Democratic Party victory would be good for them.
Most of the callers to the show, he said, were ordinary people from the tribal regions that straddled the border with Afghanistan. One asked: "If there is a change of government in Washington, D.C., will we continue to receive bombs or will we receive some aid, too?"
Help towards development goes a long way in winning hearts and minds, but there are other concerns. Callers wanted to know if the people are respected or if they are looked down upon? Are they being used? And nobody complains, not even the religious parties, Khattak said, when hundreds of Taliban are killed by the Pakistan army, which itself has incurred huge casualties. But civilian deaths provide a boon to the extremists.
Back at the Merrimack Restaurant, Ari Kagan explained that foreign policy is one reason why the Russian émigré community, which is about 70 percent Jewish, is quite supportive of Hillary Clinton. More generally, there is nostalgia for the 1990s when the nation's image was good and the economy was strong. "Now you hide if you are American," he said, crouching slightly and shielding his face with his forearms.
But, I asked him, with two families monopolizing the White House since 1988, aren't people ready for a new face? "They're tired of Bush, yes. But not Clinton," Kagan said, while affirming his own neutrality as a journalist. Senator Barack Obama, he added, is very much an unknown quantity for New York's Russians.
Bedford, Monday, 8 p.m.
Mitt Romney is certainly a known quantity in New Hampshire, having been governor of neighboring Massachusetts. About 500 supporters, many of them middle-class parents with their children, came to McKelvie Middle School in Bedford to see a candidate who'd been trailing in the polls. But he didn't need to work too hard to convince this audience that his business acumen and experience made him an ideal choice for the presidency.
Romney is a first-rate communicator and he knew which buttons to push. "Talk radio and the people spoke up," he said about the McCain-Kennedy bill. Our visiting group was well aware that the majority of America's citizens supported the bipartisan move before the fear-mongers got started. But Romney was on a roll. "It's not right," one man of about 60 said to his wife, as if hearing about the abomination of illegal aliens for the first time.
Toward the end, the candidate positioned himself as the man to beat Barrack Obama in the General Election. "I will ask Senator Obama what changes he has made," he pledged.
From there, we drove to see Obama himself at Concord High.
The large press contingent was joined by up to 2,000 supporters, a huge majority of them college students. The next biggest demographic, it seemed, were couples in the 55 to 65 age bracket. "There are a lot of hippies in these hills," one local commentator told me.
The senator appeared on stage in time for the 11 o'clock news, and stayed until after midnight. He didn't disappoint.
The previously skeptical Ari Kagan walked away impressed. "It's a completely different way of looking at politics," he acknowledged. The Russian-born journalist particularly liked the way Obama talked about healing the divisions in American society.
"He's intelligent and he's charismatic," he said.
I asked a middle-aged woman named Connie "Why Obama?" "His style of leadership," she said. "I read his book and I felt a connection." And then she invoked the magic name from the 1960s by way of comparison: John Kennedy.
Back in 2008, the night's work wasn't done. Two of our party, Lotus Chau and Eva Kern-Jedrychowska still had to file stories for their Chinese- and Polish-language dailies.
Exeter, Tuesday, 7 a.m.
Ron Paul's night-owl libertarians, who'd found perches at key intersections in every town we visited on Monday, were nowhere to be seen early Tuesday as voters formed long lines outside Exeter Town Hall.
"I never declare who I vote for, but I hope they'll make the changes," one senior citizen told me. The fact that she used "hope" and "changes" in the same clause was no indication that she'd just voted for Obama. New Hampshire's voters are a special breed. Max, a man in his 40s, said he voted "because of the condition the world is in today." He felt that America's image had to be restored; we had to be more diplomatic. "I went with Mitt this time," he said.
Caroline, 31, described herself as an independent voter. "I guess I'm partly a Republican," she laughed. Her father is a leading member of the GOP in her hometown in Connecticut. But then added: "The Republicans have only talked about God and war for eight years." She nodded towards the steps of the town hall: "Last night McCain made Osama bin Laden the issue, but people can't afford health insurance or pay off college loans.
"The Democrats talk about the real issues," she said. "So I decided to vote for Hillary Clinton."
At a nearby café, a woman and her 24-year-old daughter said they had failed to agree on the Republican candidate to support. The older woman felt that the economy was in poor shape and that it would be difficult for her daughter to buy a home when she settled down.
"But we haven't been invaded," she said. The fact that several of her Irish-American cousins in Brooklyn who are cops and firefighters were caught up in 9/11 helped make her decision. "I voted for Rudy," she said. "I voted for Romney," said the daughter. And whereas her mother wrote in that she wanted McCain as vice-president, the younger woman regarded the Arizona senator as a closet liberal.
Phillips Exeter Academy, 9 a.m.
Our main guide, NPR's John Rudolph introduced some of us to a colleague from public radio's local affiliate who made the pitch for the New Hampshire primary. Sitting in a classroom at Phillips Exeter Academy, Jon Greenberg said that the process was "very intimate" and conducted on a "very human scale." He added, in reference to the candidates: "You do get an understanding of what's behind the façade. People can fake it only for so long."
One of the students told us that most who had volunteered for the phone bank had done so for the Democratic Party. And far from being irritated by their cold calling, she revealed, New Hampshire voters were usually pleased that young people were involving themselves in the process.
Julie Quinn, the school's director of communications, told me that the move of Primary Day from late January was disappointing for students. "We lost almost three weeks," she said. But Quinn, whose forbears came from County Mayo and near Youghal, Co. Cork, said that there was added excitement this time because of the quality of the candidates. She said people thought Obama brought an "elegance and eloquence" that was reminiscent of JFK.
A little later our entire group heard local polling expert Andrew K. Smith fill in the picture sketched by Greenberg. "You can't run on celebrity in New Hampshire," Smith said. In that regard, Rudolph Giuiliani ran a "horrible" campaign in the state. The voters want to shake a candidate's hand while looking at him or her in the eye, which appeared not to be the ex-mayor's style.
Smith said that after McCain had squandered his money on a national campaign that went nowhere, he had no choice but to return to the "retail politics" of New Hampshire. As for John Edwards, voters were confused by his transformation from a moderate Southern Democrat into a fire-breathing economic populist. And he said that Clinton campaign's woes stemmed from its hostile, lock-down attitude to the print media, something Maureen Dowd would refer to in her column the next day.
Nashua, Tuesday, 7 p.m.
Even if his prediction for a huge Obama win proved to be way off, Smith's entertaining insider's view of the race was considered a trip highlight. He threw in for good measure the tip that there was usually more food and drink at the losers' parties. Some of us, however, opted for a long, dry and hungry night and were driven by our guide and now friend, a woman named Hilary, to the Obama event at Nashua High School South. The others went off to see the other Hillary, got pizza and eventually shook hands with the former president.
Meanwhile the Nashua auditorium, which was even bigger than that at Concord, was soon packed with up 3,000 people. This time the college kids and the early boomers were joined by the 20- through 40-somethings for the expected victory party, while hundreds from the world's press took up position at their monitors in an adjoining hall. Our group found a position against a barrier allocated to photographers in the main auditorium and doggedly held to it for four hours.
Initially deflated, the Obama supporters roused a cheer for every indication that he was closing the gap. On the big screen the Chris Matthews-led MSNBC team struggled to say anything meaningful or even marginally entertaining.
And we waited. Then news came that exit polls showed that "older women" had returned to Hillary. And the talking heads now had something to talk about. Columnist Mike Barnacle waxed lyrical about women doing second jobs as waitresses. And on they went with the mantra "older women." That so many Obama volunteers working on this evening were white women over 45 – some of whom could have been waitresses – induced a cognitive dissonance of sorts.
One of these volunteers Sheila Muse, who signed on early last summer, told me she had never even voted before. But not having believed the polls, she didn't take the loss too badly. "They weren't realistic," she said.
Finally, the AP projected for Hillary and preempting a similar move from CNN, the campaign team got things going. Michelle Obama introduced her husband as "the love of my life, the father of my children and the next president of the United States."
When the candidate himself declared that he wanted to be the next president, the crowd erupted almost with relief. It had been a strange night and they welcomed the reassurance. At the end, he passed on the last phrase of his speech and they ran with it. "Yes we can...Yes we can..." they chanted over and over.
Whatever was in their hearts, they sounded happy and hopeful.
Editor’s note: This article was sponsored by New York Community Media Alliance’s 2008 Election Initiative.
