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"FacebookPinterest\n\n When Bill Burton offered me the job of Barack Obama's New Hampshire spokesman, the only condition\u2014aside from the Sorkin-esque Do not fuck up\u2014was that I had to make it up there that same day. This was February 2007. I'd been working for a freshman congressman, but had spent the previous month waging a hail-Mary campaign of my own to get myself hired by Obama, the first candidate who'd ever made me feel anything big. Now his national press secretary-in-waiting was on the phone. \"Go home right now and pack a bag,\" he said. My boss was on the House floor for a vote so I left without saying goodbye.\n\n I remember the day in first grade when our teacher spelled out for us the names of the 1988 Democratic contenders: D-U-K-A-K-I-S, she wrote in fat-tipped marker. G-E-P-H-A-R-D-T. And then she pulled down the roller map that all the classrooms used to have, and pointed way up to the corner. \"It all starts in New Hampshire,\" she told us. The state has held the first presidential primary since 1920, and while every four years Nevada or Florida will play chicken with the calendar, New Hampshire never swerves. \"It's not an issue of this as a New Hampshire ego trip,\" said a Republican activist\u2014now Newt Gingrich's state director\u2014this fall. \"This is a matter of democracy.\"\n\n We think of Bill Clinton delivering his \"comeback kid\" speech in 1992, of Ed Muskie standing on the steps of the Manchester Union Leader's offices in a snowstorm, cheeks glistening as he defends his wife's character. We think of volunteers picking their way down icy sidewalks to pass out leaflets and candidates taking thoughtful questions from Farmer Joe as he leans on a rake in his pumpkin patch. And that's what I imagined I was in for, too, the soft-focus, aw-shucks, snow-globe-come-to-life stuff that you hear about on Meet the Press.\n\n But imagining the New Hampshire primary is rather starkly different from actually living it, and living it turned out to be one of the most frustrating experiences of my life. Certainly every presidential campaign is exhausting and stressful, and you could chalk it up\u2014as our perennially upbeat colleagues in Iowa would\u2014as good practice for the jobs we'd end up landing, a year later, in the administration. But there was something different about working in New Hampshire.\n\n Voters here believe that having every candidate in their living room is a God-given right; that they should never even consider voting for anyone they haven't met; that their advice on everything from policy to campaign strategy should be taken as gospel. And when others question the sanctity of their primary, they tell you that the entire American way of life depends on their slow-dance with the candidates. What they don't tell you, what no one tells you when they're waxing on about this hoariest of democratic rites, is that the primary turns the people here into monsters.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n As New Hampshire press secretary it was my job to answer questions from local reporters\u2014many of them at small regional dailies, the kind with the office above the printing press\u2014and to drum up interest in what the campaign was doing in their town. Very often this meant trying to convince a cranky, overextended general assignment reporter, living through his fifth primary, to drive through the slush to cover the opening of his local Obama office. (Our twentieth in the state! Really!) Or calling WMUR\u2014New Hampshire's only television station\u2014and pleading with them to send a cameraman to a house party appearance by a little-known surrogate campaigner.\n\n Every morning I'd wake up at dawn in a rundown apartment I shared with Katina Tsongas, one of our field chiefs and daughter of the late New Hampshire primary winner, Paul Tsongas. By sunup there would be scores of new and ominous messages on our BlackBerrys, most delivering either bad news about Obama\u2014we were down 30 points in the state for much of the year\u2014or questions from our bosses about why her organizers hadn't hit their phone-banking numbers the night before, or why I hadn't managed to wring more clips out of that office opening.\n\n The campaign's base of operations was the second floor of an old brick mill building on Manchester's industrial south side, where we shared office space with a nurse-training program and the New Hampshire Department of Corrections. A sign in the stairwell read PROBATION: SECOND FLOOR. (The Obama HQ has now been taken over by a job placement agency for people on welfare.) Days were a blur of phone calls, dread, conspiratorial IMs about what Chicago was thinking (\"they don't tell me anything either\"), and the gnawing feeling of having missed a meal.\n\n Sometime near midnight, I'd collapse into the same dirty sheets in my frigid room and pass out, sleeping so deeply that when the apartment building across from my window burned down one night, I didn't wake up.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n I flew back to Manchester earlier this fall, just as the leaves were beginning to turn, as Herman Cain's star was rising and Mitt Romney was the presumed nominee, to see what, if anything had changed. One of the first visits I made was to the office of state Senator Lou D'Allesandro. D'Allesandro, a Democrat, has been in the New Hampshire senate for 14 years and in politics for 40, and if he has a particular specialty it's playing coquette as rival campaigns seek his support; he magically appears at every candidate's events and publicly narrates his deliberations. \"D'Allesandro is still shopping for a presidential candidate,\" the Concord Monitor dutifully reported during the last campaign. \"Clinton attended a party at [his] home Thursday\u2026Bill Richardson is due to make the same stop this morning.\" Obama's name never graced that list. D'Allesandro's antics were already so well known that we decided to pass and let the other campaigns go groveling.\n\n \"Lookit, I've known every president since I've been alive,\" D'Allesandro told me from behind a desk cluttered with thank-you plaques and freebie mugs. \"When Barack Obama sees me, he says 'Hi, Lou.' When Joe Biden sees me he says, 'Hi, Lou.' Ok? When I go to D.C. and meet with Hillary, she's a friend. I consider Bill Clinton a friend of mine.\"\n\n (Although the Obama team had skipped D'Allesandro, there were plenty of other puffed-up elected officials for our political team to spend its time courting, including 400 state reps. That's not a typo: New Hampshire's legislature is the fourth-largest governing body in the English-speaking world, its House only 35 seats shy of the U.S. Congress. And, this being the first-in-the-nation primary state, each of these legislators gets to make his own presidential endorsement, usually only after protracted flirtation with multiple suitors.)\n\n \"I've had Hillary at my house\" D'Allesandro continued. \"I've had Biden at my house. I've had Richardson at my house. I've had Gephardt at my house. You name 'em, they've been at my house. 332 St. James Avenue. And John Kerry says his goal in life was to have his picture on my refrigerator.\"\n\n And?\n\n \"And he's there. So that's kind of what it's all about. And look at the sacrifices we make to keep that. I don't get any money.\" He leaned back in his banker's chair and threw his arms out wide. \"Who wants to walk around in the snow? I walk around in the snow knocking on doors with Hillary Clinton. Bang bang bang, 'Hi, I'm Lou D'Allesandro.'\"\n\n It always seemed crazy to me that a State Senator knocking on someone's door with Hillary Clinton in tow might be more effective than Hillary showing up on her own. But it does say something essential about the primary here: this is at its heart a local race. In a state where voters pitch each other on their favored candidate while in line at Hannaford or the town dump, the support of local big shots can actually make a difference. And they know it.\n\n Every small-town dignitary, from the Democratic Chairman of Swanzey to the Grafton County Register of Deeds to the president of the Dartmouth College Republicans, commands repeated public prostration before he'll join up, setting off a statewide game of hard to get. The threshold for winning each one over varies, from needing to learn more about the candidate's position on defense spending to actually having to meet the candidate in person. Every voter, no matter how far out in the snow-filled woods, seems to feel entitled to a face-to-face interview before committing. \"I can't support Senator Obama,\" one Concord voter told us, \"unless I get 10 minutes alone with him.\"\n\n Mike Cuzzi, our New Hampshire political director, set up a private dinner at a resort in Rye for a select group of \"grasstops\" Democrats, the kind of must-get local activists whose public support will telegraph your appeal and strength as a candidate. The meal went swimmingly, but afterward not a single guest was willing to commit to Obama then and there. \"What do I have to do,\" Obama asked Cuzzi afterward, \"wash their cars?\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n Can you deliver Barack Obama to the Amherst Fourth of July Parade? How about the Merrimack County Pig Roast? Still waiting to hear from you about Greekfest in Manchester\u2014or maybe you want Hillary to have the stage to herself? The requests started coming in the day I took the job, before I was even off the Jersey Turnpike, and they never stopped; they just turned increasingly into threats. For a campaign staff, New Hampshire is an obstacle course of chili suppers, ice cream socials, and cider festivals\u2014and each, according to the activists, is the event you must attend.\n\n \"You are not going to win the Southern Tier if you can't get Obama to show up for the Milford Labor Day parade,\" we were warned. (I had gotten special dispensation to attend a friend's wedding in Connecticut the night before, where I overindulged and overslept, missing our first event of the day and barely making it back in time for the parade.) For hours we wended our way through the heat-blasted streets behind the governor of New Hampshire, Mitt Romney 1.0, and Chris Dodd, our contingent by far the biggest, even accompanied by a garage band of college kids playing Yankee Doodle. And yet, because Obama had to leave for another event in nearby Hudson instead of attending the post-parade meet-and-greet at the Milford VFW, our local endorsers gravely informed us that it did not seem like Obama was taking the town seriously. Sure enough, we lost Milford by 40 votes.\n\n In another small town, a husband-and-wife activist duo made it known that if Obama did not attend their Fall Festival there would be consequences. \"They called me at all hours,\" said Matthew Riemer, a scruffy Texan import who worked for us as a field organizer in the counties southwest of Manchester. \"They called other town chairs to withhold support on their behalf, called the Manchester office incessantly, called Chicago, called the Senate office, and so on. Because of their insanity, they ended up getting a phone call from Obama directly.\" The couple used their five minutes of phone time to try to tie him down for the party\u2014an event he wouldn't have been able to schedule for himself even if he'd wanted to. They went with Edwards.\n\n When I canvassed our old campaign staff, almost everyone came back to me with stories about demand for campaign swag\u2014buttons, stickers, and most especially, yard signs. New Hampshire's got a thing about signs, and there never seem to be enough of them to satisfy the activists. \"I always tell people 'signs don't vote,'\" a Rick Perry campaign official told me at their office in Manchester. \"And people are kind of eh.\" Riemer recalled that \"a town chair got three 4-by-8 signs, rolls of stickers and a call from Obama\u2014yet he never said Obama correctly, always putting an 'S' where the 'B' should have been.\"\n\n For New Hampshire voters, though, this really isn't about decoration or collectibles: they demand signs and buttons and bumper stickers because a campaign's investment in chum is a handy stand-in for a campaign's investment in New Hampshire. And if there is one thing the voters here will sniff out\u2014through the millions of dollars of TV ads and glossy mailers\u2014it's whether you're sufficiently committed to winning them over.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n The Union Leader's Drew Cline and I met for lunch on the day the village of Goffstown held its annual Pumpkin Regatta, where oversized specimens of New Hampshire's state fruit are weighed, eaten, carved, painted, catapulted, and ultimately ridden down the Piscataquog River. He was troubled that not a single candidate attended. \"In some places the fall festival isn't the same if you don't have pumpkin pie or apple crisp,\" he said. \"Here, it's not the same if you don't have a candidate there.\"\n\n For him, it's proof that the candidates didn't seem to be wooing voters as much as they had in the past. Cline is often found in the back of campaign events snapping photos on his personal camera; he's a political junkie as much as he is a journalist, and he and I had always managed to maintain a friendship despite the fact that he writes most of the newspaper's searingly right-wing editorials. (A month after our lunch the paper would call Obama a \"wet-behind-the-ears socialist wannabe.\") Because Cline also helps to steer the Union Leader's crucial endorsement in the GOP primary\u2014which in November would go to Newt Gingrich, perfectly timed to fuel his late surge\u2014nearly all of the candidates had come by his office to kiss the ring. But Cline is less interested in acts of personal tribute than he is in seeing these guys plain show up a little bit more. \"They just aren't coming this year,\" he told me.\n\n Indeed, across New Hampshire\u2014and in its sister early states, Iowa and South Carolina\u2014perception was setting in that a national, televised affair focused on glitzy prime-time face-offs was replacing the retail politicking of yore. \"In what is shaping up as a profound change in American politics,\" the New York Times wrote disapprovingly in December, \"the living room stops and the cafe visits where candidates offer handshakes and make appeals for support are creeping toward extinction. The onetime fixtures of the campaign trail are giving way to the Fox News studio and televised debates.\"\n\n Cline sees over-cautiousness at work. \"They don't want a YouTube moment,\" he said, \"and when you're here, you can't control your message.\" Of course, not having control over what you talk about is the point of the whole thing. The New Hampshire process is designed to make the voter king\u2014and the candidates have no choice but to answer the questions they're asked, rather than just reciting the focus-grouped message points that fill their briefing binders.\n\n During a late-summer visit meant to amplify Obama's central \"change\" theme, we staged a roundtable discussion with the candidate at a diner in Hanover. Everything was going smoothly until a participant cautioned him against attacking Hillary Clinton, producing a decidedly off-message AP wire story entitled \"Obama Gets Warning From Friendly Voter.\" (The friendly, I recall, was added only after desperate pleading on my part.) Things got worse later in the day when, answering a question about Afghanistan at a town hall meeting in Nashua, Obama said \"We've got to get the job done there and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure there.\" The left-leaning crowd ate it up, but on the car ride back to Manchester I got a call from a reporter asking, \"Is it true that Obama said that the only thing we're doing in Afghanistan is killing civilians?\"\n\n I hadn't even noticed the word \"just,\" but our opponents had. Soon, national headquarters in Chicago was calling with demands for verbatim audio. \"You gotta give me a heads up when this kind of shit happens in New Hampshire,\" a displeased Robert Gibbs warned me. \"By the time Obama got back into the motorcade we were already catching darts on this thing.\"\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n A few days before the eighth Republican debate, up at Dartmouth, I drove out to Hopkinton, just west of Concord, to see Mitt Romney in action. Hopkinton is your storybook New England town if there ever was one: maples blazing orange along Main Street, a country store at the only intersection, and clapboard houses clustered on either side of an actual Town Hall. When I arrived, the assembly room was positively buzzing. We'd never staged an event there, but I knew it from the C-SPAN clips: the hand-painted town seal (Settled 1736, Incorporated 1765) has long been a favorite backdrop for genuflection to New Hampshire voters.\n\n About two hundred people lined spindle-backed Shaker benches and leaned against the walls, waiting for Romney to appear. Staffers on the white-columned front porch had done an admirable job handing out Romney stickers and literature, and most of the audience members I talked to were either leaning toward Mitt or solidly in his column. An elderly couple who'd been with him since the last primary \"because we just like what he has to say,\" gestured toward their neighbor on the bench. \"That's the guy you oughta be talking to,\" the woman said. \"He voted for Obama last time.\"\n\n The man in question was ruddy and neatly dressed, with carefully combed brown hair, a denim shirt open at the collar, and a camcorder clutched in his lap. He said he was a Hopkinton resident and registered Democrat who works in the parts department at a nearby car dealership. We'll call him Steve. \"I voted for that man and I wish I hadn't,\" he said of Obama. \"I tell you what, I'm leaning towards Romney, as long he's not gonna flip-flop, know what I mean?\"\n\n Steve said his main objection to Obama is health care reform and \"institutionalized socialism,\" though he gives Romney a pass on implementing government-mandated health care reform in Massachusetts because \"he was roped into a bunch of bills that mean other things.\" Also he's very concerned about guns, and this is where Romney has some work to do to earn Steve's vote. \n\n \"If he's gonna outlaw that, I'm not for him. At all. Point blank. I'm a big gun guy. I love guns. But I'm not for criminals having guns. So, amen,\" he said, though it wasn't clear if he was referring to anything in Romney's record or anyone else's. I asked Steve why he ever voted for Obama in the first place. He colored slightly and shook his head. \"I didn't like Bush,\" he says. \"But you know what? He looks like the fairy princess compared to Obama right now.\"\n\n Soon Romney arrived in the de rigeur business casual attire we'd so often insisted upon for our candidate: the khakis, understated shoes, and rolled-up sleeves\u2014no tie\u2014of the prosperous Yankee in his element. (\"Do you mind if I take off my jacket?\" Obama would often ask, to hoots of approval.) Romney moved through the crowd, joking and backslapping in the comfortable, ain't-it-grand mode of the frontrunner, ladling out a line of greeting to each smiling face. \"Nice to be here! Wow, you're tall! I hope that finger gets better\u2014ouch!\"\n\n He was introduced by his big endorsement of the day, former Senator and Governor Judd Gregg. \"I went to first and second grade right here in Hopkinton!\" Gregg told the hometown crowd. Romney took the mike and launched into a vague but peppy stump speech. He knocked \"career politicians\" with a straight face, and said of those in Washington \"they don't understand the power of freedom!\"\n\n Steve, now crouching behind his camcorder in the middle of an aisle, shouted out \"Your take on the Second Amendment, please?\" Romney said he was for it. Steve replied with a hearty \"thank you!\" Later, Romney invoked Obama's prediction that if the economy didn't improve he'd be a one-term president. \"Well tonight, we're here to collect!\" he said. Big applause.\n\n Everyone booed \"Obamacare\" at the right moments, and the anger in Hopkinton, as elsewhere, was palpable. But what really struck me was that even if attitudes toward Obama had changed, Romney's campaign events were deeply similar to the ones we had put on here. If you changed the words \"big government\" to \"George Bush,\" Romney's anti-Washington blandishments would have played just as well at a Clinton or Obama rally in 2007.\n\n \"I think you're gonna find the American people recognize that it's time for real change in Washington,\" Romney told a crowd in Concord a couple weeks later. \"We're a patriotic people. These patriotic people are going to come together to do what's necessary to keep America great!\"\n\n It's the same old feel-good fare. And the rapturous reception it gets seems to illustrate that neither the candidates nor the voters take the hallowed vetting process quite as seriously as they'd have you believe. But then, American politics has always been about giving people that special feeling. And though nobody wants to admit it exactly, winning in New Hampshire seems like such a good predictor for success not because the questions are so hard or the process so rigorous, but because it's clear right away\u2014without the disfiguring proxy of the TV camera\u2014whether voters actually might grow to like you.\n\n\u00B7\u00B7\u00B7\n\n For all of our pleading, deal-making, flirting, and cajoling, Obama, as you might recall, did not win New Hampshire. Maybe that was because he didn't attend enough apple-picking parties, or because he flippantly called Clinton \"likeable enough\" in the final debate, or because she cried at a roundtable in Portsmouth. Whatever it was, the voters seemed to turn on us for no reason and without warning, and we lost the primary in an election-night shocker. But a funny thing happened: Obama won the presidency anyway.\n\n In New Hampshire they like to say, \"Iowa picks corn, but New Hampshire picks presidents.\" The cynic might question this. He might point out that, in fact, our last three presidents all lost the New Hampshire primary. He might point out that winning New Hampshire hasn't elevated anyone to the presidency in nearly 25 years, that you'd have to go as far back as Bush senior in 1988 to follow a winner from Manchester to the White House. He might further suggest that the New Hampshire primary tradition is just that\u2014a nice tradition, but one that has outlived its usefulness, is not representative of the diverse national electorate, and is perhaps more trouble than it's worth.\n\n This is a question I asked Jim Rubens, a former state senator turned entrepreneur, at a coffee shop in upscale Hanover, a town he used to represent. White-haired and handsome in the wind-burned way of old-line New Englanders, Rubens is the kind of Republican you miss these days: exceedingly civil, crisply attired, and an unapologetic adherent to scientific fact. He is also, whatever his differences with today's Republican mainstream, a fierce defender of New Hampshire's primary. \"When the candidate comes into our living room or our town meeting we learn more,\" Rubens said over his mocha. \"When the candidate goes into another state, like Florida, the media is the interface because the candidates can't possibly expose themselves to whatever number of millions of people are in Florida. It's a national race at that point.\"\n\n National, he says with disdain, explaining that putting an end to the New Hampshire primary would cede all the power to the big states, states where no rational voter ever expects to meet the candidates in person and no one bothers to think of tough questions, or compare answers. States where whoever has the most money, or has the slickest ads, or the most attacks running against his opponent, generally wins. In other words, the primary would fall victim to everything that we find disgusting about the general election. \"We know we have more power just because we live here,\" Rubens said. \"I'm not claiming the New Hampshire voter is a better person, but we are citizens who expect\u2014demand\u2014this kind of process.\"\n\n And there is a larger point, he insisted, in this era of disempowerment that has given rise both to the Tea Party and to the Occupy Wall Street crowd. \"If you go into any other state and ask people 'Do you feel you have any influence over Washington,' what do they say? They say 'I have no influence over Washington.' And they're right!\"\n\n Romney strategist Stuart Stevens put it a bit more simply a few days later, after a campaign event in Concord. \"Isn't it amazing?\" he said. \"These people can just walk in and ask whatever they want.\"\n\n It's that right\u2014that ability and entitlement to walk straight up to a candidate, look in his eyes, and see whether you like him\u2014that is the source of the primary's power here. Yes, it's a miserable slog for the poor souls who work on the campaigns, and there's a decent chance it'll sour you on the whole political enterprise forever, but there is something vital about it that you just don't see anywhere else: politics here happens in first-person. And in a country that seems ever more disenchanted and cut off from the people who govern it, that just might be worth preserving. Even if it's a colossal pain in the ass.\n\n A few weeks after I returned from New Hampshire, I got an email from a friend in the newsroom at Manchester's WMUR-TV. President Obama was set to return to Manchester for a rally at Central High, and the reporter was looking, as always, to score a one-on-one interview. But the White House wasn't cooperating. I said I'd see what I could do and sent off an email. It wasn't until days later that I realized I had become that guy, the self-styled expert pushing advice about keeping the natives happy. \"They're the only TV station and everybody watches,\" my message to Obama's state spokesman reads. \"On the day of the New Hampshire primary in 2008 he promised them an interview as president, and they have not forgotten.\"\n\n Reid Cherlin, a writer based in D.C., worked as a spokesman for Obama from 2007 until last spring. He will be covering the New Hampshire primary for GQ.com."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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