What Makes New Hampshire Tick?

When I set out for New Hampshire to report "Blue Challenge" my task was clear. I had to explain how the Democratic gains in the Granite State reflected, portended or otherwise related to political developments going on around the county. In other words, make people in 49 other states care about what's going on in one puny state.

Upon arriving, though, I immediately discovered a complication, beyond just a cell phone on the fritz and a rental car with a gas gauge that didn't gauge its supply of gas: New Hampshire is really weird. Every state has its eccentricities, of course, but, more than most, New Hampshire's center on politics.

First of all, there's New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation presidential primary (Iowa's just a caucus, a New Hampshire resident will be quick to remind you). A quadrennial presidential candidate infestation is a bigger deal than you might imagine, partially because the presidential candidates start arriving years in advance. An hour after I arrived in Manchester, John Edwards spoke five minutes from my hotel.

I didn't have anything else to do that evening, so I went to see him. Even though the Barnes and Noble was packed, many -- perhaps most -- of the assembled crowd had met him before. There were plenty of, "I saw you in place X" or "Do you remember Y?" One spectator presented Edwards with a photo picturing the giver of the photo and Edwards' wife Elizabeth who, of course, had recently traveled to New Hampshire too.

When I interviewed Democrats later on in the trip, I used the Edwards event as an icebreaker, saying, "I knew that I was in New Hampshire when John Edwards was speaking five minutes from my hotel." They, to a person, were unimpressed, often excitedly mentioning Barack Obama's scheduled trip to the state. That speaks to Obama's appeal, but it also shows that the New Hampshire political class is more than a little spoiled.

The implications of being first in the nation, though, run much deeper than a sense of entitlement. Top Republicans told me their party's defeats in the state in 2004 and 2006 have a lot to do with the January 2004 presidential primary. That's when President Bush had no opposition -- and therefore little reason to campaign in the state -- but the eight or so Democratic contenders spent innumerable hours explaining how the President and Republican Congress had failed.

Whether or not you buy that argument, it shows how presidential politics seem to be lurking behind every corner in New Hampshire. A Dartmouth political scientist said she has students who came to her school for the primary (I wish I'd thought of that.) George Pataki, Mike Huckabee, Wesley Clark, Bill Richardson and Tom Vilsack all helped out in the 2005 Manchester mayoral race, campaigning and raising money for the competing candidates. Funny, isn't it, that they all happened to feel so passionately about the same small city's municipal government?

But the primary doesn't just make New Hampshire's politics odd, it makes the people odd too -- in a good way. You'd be hard-pressed to find a more politically knowledgeable state or one where national issues matter more to people. That's what happens when national political figures are constantly coming to talk to you.

Of course, the odd people make the politics odder still. When the national mood heavily favors one party, the biggest effects will be in the places that care about national issues. It's no surprise, therefore, that New Hampshire and Iowa were two outlier states November 7, places where the Democrats won much bigger than they did elsewhere. That said, the Democratic wins in New Hampshire came in spite of the party's tinkering with its presidential calendar, a subject of angst for more than one person with whom I spoke.

What else makes New Hampshire weird? The legislature (or "General Court") has 424 members, 400 of whom serve in the House of Representatives. In other words, each House member represents around 3,300 people, compared to 450,000 in California.

This matters in ways both small and large. When, upon my first trip to the Capitol, my cell phone began suffering what later proved to be a terminal illness, there was a kindly legislator to take me to the members-only phone. In New Hampshire, there's always a legislator nearby.

Doug Scamman, the outgoing speaker, made one of the most interesting suggestions I heard on the whole trip: That New Hampshire's hefty House allows it to get away with less government than almost any other place. There are other states where libertarianism reigns -- Oregon and Arizona to name a couple -- but, East of the Mississippi, New Hampshire is it (just another thing that makes the state strange). The state blends a fiscal austerity that would make Grover Norquist proud with a preference for permissive stands on social issues.

Scamman said that having a huge legislature allows lawmakers to be the first line for citizen complaints. They help constituents solve problems, so that bureaucrats don't have to get involved.

If that sounds like something that would put a burden on legislators, it's not the only thing. As one person told me, "We don't even have a lot of good parking spaces." The incoming House Speaker, Terie Norelli, said that when she was first elected years ago, her daughter wasn't sold on the concept until she discovered that mom got to drive the toll road for free. That's what passes for a perk in New Hampshire, but it's little solace for legislators who are paid $200 a biennium. Apparently, the Granite State hasn't heard of the minimum wage.

Lawmakers who work pretty much for free have a strange way of eschewing careers in politics, which is just what the state wants. That means that, partisan upheaval or not, every two years there are huge numbers of new members coming to the General Court. Norelli said that, despite campaigning all over the state, there were new members of her caucus who she'd never met. That revelation made it clear to me that, on school finance and other key political issues facing New Hampshire, no one's quite sure what will happen next. Of course, you could say that about just about any state.