EDITOR AT LARGE

What makes New Hampshire citizens so different from everyone else on the planet? Is it because we refuse to be told what to do? Are we truly as independent minded as the media makes us out to be? What’s so special about NH, the editor suggests, is just how normal we actually are.

The Closer You Look, the Stranger We Get

The night before the New Hampshire primary a strange character usually seen only in the South crept up to my office door. No, it was not Mike Huckabee. It was an opossum, drawn into the open by a sudden January thaw. The same warm weather drew a record number of New Hampshire voters out of their homes and into the election booth.

It was a thrilling primary that had the world news media spinning. CNN had one of its pundits posed all night in front of a gigantic computer touch-screen with a telestrater, manipulating a map of New Hampshire like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. When John McCain took the Republican victory only minutes after the polls closed, the CNN expert spent the rest of the evening dissecting the battle between Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Although the two were separated by only two percentage points, CNN played the drama as if the whole world was watching – because it was.

The New Hampshire primary is important, and not only because it is the first in the nation. It is important because every four years real people tell the world what they think about America. The candidates are important too, but for my money, the show is really about the citizens of New Hampshire. We have been described as "fiercely independent" and "famously quirky". This year we were even lampooned on an episode of The Simpsons, and you can’t get more important than that.

I don’t believe that the people of New Hampshire are more quirky or more independent than the citizens of any other state. The whole "live free or die" thing is as much marketing as reality. What’s important is not that we are iconoclasts, but that the rest of the world thinks we are. And so, for one shining moment every four years – they listen. And because the media devotes so much firepower to covering our primary, they always find plenty of fascinating, homespun, unpredictable, grassroots characters. It is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Every state has characters like Granny D, the woman who walked across the United States in her 90s, then ran for state senator. She is 98 now and spoke truth to power in an interview on BBC. Granny pulls no punches. She liked all the Democratic candidates, but couldn’t vote for Hillary because she is "bought and paid for". Portsmouth’s gritty Ruth Griffin, long time member of the governor’s council, pushed her way to the front of a Republican rally to grab the cameras and boom out her preference for Mike Huckabee. The Washington Post gave her a full page. YouTube ran a lengthy feature on a 10-year old boy who stumped door-to-door for John Edwards. The media, as always, waited breathlessly for the votes of scarcely a dozen residents of Dixville Notch. Vermin Supreme, who declares that all politicians are vermin, and so he should win by default, was once again stumping for office. People in New Hampshire are as strange as an opossum in winter.

This is good theatre. The candidates and the media know that. We New Hampshirites are "so real" that the candidates become more real simply by rubbing up against us. Hillary Clinton "found her voice" in New Hampshire, she said.

But the truth is, we are no more real or honest or quirky than anyone else. We only seem that way because the cameras are focused so tightly for so long. What America is seeing in the mirror – up close and personal – is just a bunch of average human beings doing the best they can. That may not seem important, but in a planet of super spin, superstars, superspeed and supersizing – authentically human moments are rare indeed. 

(c) 2008 J. Dennis Robinson. All rights reserved / SeacoastNH.com