POLITICS
On The Trail: New Hampshire
Midnight at The Wayfarer
By Stump Connolly
Bedford, New Hampshire -– It’s midnight at The Wayfarer, the witching hour and the ghost of politics past hangs in the air.
Hunter Thompson once described this mainstay on the campaign trail as “The Valley Forge of presidential politics.” But it seems now to have fallen on hard times. Space heaters are strategically placed around the hallways to bolster a central heating system run amok. A sign on the public washroom directs guests down the hall because this one is out of order. More alarming, the rapid-fire spin and bluster I expected to find in the bar after the ABC Facebook doubleheader debate Saturday night – three days before the New Hampshire primary -- is drowned out by the whoops and pings of a video golf game. The famous Wayfarer Inn lounge has become a sports bar.
Oh sure, there are a few old hands still hanging around. Time’s Joe Klein and Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne hold down the end of the bar and a couple correspondents and producers from CBS, the last network to still headquarter there, are scattered around the tables. Klein regales two fresh-faced admirers with stories of primaries gone by. But the mystique is gone -- and so are the people.
This year, the action has shifted downtown to The Radisson, a glitzy high-rise hotel with a convention center attached. ABC is there, running three shows and an extensive web operation out of a converted exhibit hall. Fox News has another. NBC and MSNBS broadcast from an old armory accessible through a closed-in causeway. CNN has booked 60 rooms. And there’s a Talker’s Row up on the second floor where a couple dozen talk show hosts from around the country gab away day and night.
Where
the media gather, so do the politicians. Or the handlers, at least, whose
job is to cultivate friendships and massage the news as it makes its way to
the airwaves -- “lubricate the facts,” as it was once described
to me.
For that, the Radisson has J.D’s Tavern, a poor substitute for the old Wayfarer lounge but blessed by the fact that it is located in the Grand Central Station of this year’s race.
Not that proximity is as important as it used to be. Everyone has BlackBerries. The daily campaign schedules are online. And the people who need to know aren’t just reporters but literally thousands of drivers, advancemen, embeds, stagehands, bloggers and other aptly-named facilitators who are camped out in local motels. [Ed note: The Week Behind worked out of the Red Roof Inn on Spit Brook Road.]
The candidates themselves are spread out across the state. Barack Obama and John Edwards are at the Radisson in Nashua. Mitt Romney is in Portsmouth. Hillary Clinton has three headquarter hotels in Manchester. And John McCain – well, he just hangs by his thumbs from the nearest tree at the end of every day so he can rise from the dead again in the morning.
What happened to The Wayfarer may be what is happening in politics this year. After 25 years in the hands of the caring Dunfey brothers, The Wayfarer was sold off to a succession of hotel chains, all promising to modernize it. One found the land so valuable it sold off the front entrance for a Macy’s shopping center. Then the state lopped off the back to build a new Interstate Tollway.
All the reporters could see The Wayfarer was going downhill, but no one wanted to say anything. So they quietly found other accommodations. Finally, it fell into the hands of a real estate investment group that made it a Quality Inn franchise.
But re-branding The Wayfarer as a Quality Inn was like putting lipstick on a pig. Change had been needed for a long time. Now it was obvious.
The Second Coming of Barack
Barack Obama came out of Iowa into the New Hampshire primary with more good press than Jesus ever got, even on Palm Sunday. Months of debate over whether Change or Experience would drive the 2008 campaign had been resolved decisively in favor of Change, and Obama was its new Messiah.
The Iowa caucuses were hailed as a new day in American politics. A freshman Senator from Illinois, a black man preaching the politics of hope, had bested the fabled Clinton political machine in a Midwestern state with a 98% white population. And to put a punctuation mark on the victory, Obama used his election night podium to deliver a stirring call to arms for Americans that was instantly compared to the best of Martin Luther King.
“There is no getting around it, this man who emerged triumphant from the Iowa caucuses is something unusual in American politics,” Michael Powell wrote in The New York Times. “He has that close-cropped hair and the high-school-smooth face with that deep saxophone of a voice. His borrowings, rhetorical and intellectual, are dizzying. One minute he recalls the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in his pacing and aching, staccato repetitions. The next minute he is updating John F. Kennedy with his ‘ask not what American can do for you’ riff on idealism and hope.”
The underlying truth of Obama’s Iowa victory is that it was based on a superior field organization. Steve Hildebrand, Obama’s deputy campaign manager, began building it more than a year before the caucuses, recruiting the same local party activists he successfully managed for John Kerry in 2004 and harnessing their foot power to a central database that identified potential caucus supporters, and the arguments that would sway them to Obama.
Obama’s charisma brought out thousands of other volunteers, many from out-of-state. Wary of how Howard Dean turned his “perfect storm” of student volunteers into a perfect disaster, the Obama campaign put the volunteers through extensive training sessions to teach them how not to come across as carpetbaggers.
On election night, they deluged Democratic caucuses with 239,000 people – almost double the 122,000 who attended in 2004 -- and Obama came away with the win (albeit, the prize was 16 delegates versus the 14 Clinton won by placing third.)
In New Hampshire, Obama would have to repeat the feat. This time, however, Kerry’s old field organization was lined up on the Clinton side, as were the leaders of both houses in the legislature and most of the party establishment.
Most of us watched Iowa vote on television. What we saw was a media spin on the returns, a parsing of “entrance polls” that showed Obama winning, as the commentators put it, “across the board.”
He won handily among men, split the women, and even beat Clinton among women under the age of 35. When the results were broken down by age, Obama’s support among voters ages 18 to 24 was astronomical. If 45 is now the cut-off age between young and old voters, Obama took 50 percent of the young voters against Clinton’s 16 percent.
The Iowa returns, the TV pundits all agreed, were a dire warning to the Clinton camp. Projected out across the political landscape, they seemed to show Obama’s campaign, which the candidate deftly cast as a crusade for change, was an unstoppable juggernaut.
Before the candidates even climbed on an airplane to fly to New Hampshire, Tim Russert on NBC and George Stephanopoulos on ABC were proclaiming that Clinton would have to completely rethink her campaign.
But there were only five days to do it. One of the unintended consequences of state legislatures leapfrogging their primary dates to get to the head of the pack was that there was no time for thinking.
Waiting On Hillary
When Clinton appeared at her first rally in Nashua Friday morning at 8 AM, she had been awake for 26 hours. The network news teams can move their operation from one state to another simply by switching to a fresh set of correspondents. Candidates cannot. Her campaign stops that day were a fuzzy blur. At many, she appeared tired, defeated and cranky.
On Saturday morning, The New York Times reported the Clinton camp was rife with dissension. “One longtime adviser complained that the campaign’s senior strategist, Mark Penn, realized too late that ‘change’ was a much more powerful message than ‘experience.’” wrote Patrick Healy and John M., Broder. “Another adviser said Mr. Penn and Mr. Clinton were consumed with polling data for so long, they did not fully grasp the personality deficit that Mrs. Clinton had with voters.” The one thing everyone agreed on was that she would have to recalibrate her image.
But if Clinton was changing her image, the Saturday night ABC Facebook debate gave few clues on what the new Hillary would look like. She was, alternately, pedantic, stoic, angry, and wounded (“That hurts my feelings, Charlie,” she said when moderator Charles Gibson asked whether she was unlikable.) Through it all, however, she never wavered in her resolve to defend her “35-year record as an agent of change.”
The drumbeat to see a new Hillary continued the next day on the Sunday morning talk shows, particularly Meet The Press. In his hand, Russert held the latest results of a poll conducted over the two days preceding the Iowa caucuses and the Friday after. It showed Clinton's lead in New Hampshire evaporating, wiped out by an Obama surge on the last day. Posting the numbers up for the viewers, he asked a roundtable of political consultants to give Clinton advice on how to change her campaign over the airwaves.
I
went over to Nashua High School Sunday for a noon Clinton rally to see how
the candidate would react. Outside, 3,000 people waited in a line that stretched
a half-mile down the street. A lucky few would get into the small gym that
had been set up for the occasion. The others would have to watch on TV monitors
in a spillover auditorium and converted classrooms.
Even after the doors opened, the crowd would wait. Clinton was more than an hour late. She was at the time still huddled in a hotel room with her advisers getting their advice on how to change who she was.
Howdy boys, I’m back
When I walked into the gym, Channel 7 political editor Andy Shaw was standing at the registration desk. He greeted me with a big bear hug.
“Stump, you made it,” he grinned. “Where have you been?”
Before I could unlock his grip, his counterpart at CBS2 Mike Flannery came up, but not to see me. “Hey Andy,” Flannery said. “You guys have the best ribbons. You put us to shame.” He pointed to the red, white and blue lanyard holding Andy’s credentials. “Can you get me one?”
“We have hats too,” Shaw said.
Swag? They were singing my song. “I’ll take one,” I said.
“All they say is Vote 2008,” he said.
“Forget it,” I said. “I thought they might say ELECTION JUDGE or something.”
Roger Simon, another old Chicago friend who has gone on to become one of the pre-eminent political columnists on the campaign trail, was sitting alone on a folding chair busily typing on his laptop. This year, Simon is the chief political correspondent of Politico.com, the Internet start-up that is like a traveling All-star team of political pundits, and he too greeted me warmly. Making small talk, I noted that every time I saw him at a campaign event, he was typing up a story for the web.
“Yeah, we’re all wire service reporters these days,” he said.
Chris Matthews of Hardball and Mort Kondracke of Fox News showed up, as did all of the major newspaper reporters and columnists. Soon enough, Russert walked in. I took the occasion to ask him a question that had been on my mind all week. “Do you sometimes feel like you’re leading the story instead of following it?"
“Leading the story?” he asked back.
“Yeah, leading the campaign story. Your program is so integral to it all—“
“I never thought of it that way. I just ask questions,” he answered. “That’s my job. I ask tough questions. If they can’t answer tough questions, then they aren’t prepared to make tough decisions.”
I stayed at the rally as long as I could, but I had a book signing I couldn’t miss at the Toadstool Bookshop in Milford [Talk’s Cheap, Let’s Race! by Stump Connolly. Available on Amazon.com and fine bookstores everywhere] so I defer here to an account of Clinton’s performance by the only reporter in the room who was paying attention:
Clinton talked about issue after issue in almost mind-numbing detail and answered question after question in an event that lasted more than an hour and a half, Simon wrote in Politco.
But Clinton’s crowd was much smaller at the end of her speech than at the beginning. Hundreds of people trickled and then streamed out while Clinton was still talking. But she went on and on as if she did not mind. And maybe she didn’t.
“You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose," Clinton said, quoting Mario Cuomo. In other words: Dull is good. Dull is a sign of competence. But can dull get you elected? Especially when your chief rival is selling poetry?
“I applaud his incredible ability to make a speech that really leaves people inspired," Clinton said of Obama after her speech. "My point is that when the cameras disappear and you’re there in the Oval Office having to make tough decisions, I believe I am better prepared and ready to lead our country.’”
An Alternate Reality
On
the Republican side of the fence, I felt an obligation Monday to go see Mitt
Romney just to get a fair and balanced perspective.
I caught up with him at a monthly meeting of the Rotary Club in the Nashua Country Club. Before Romney's speech, the club president greeted us, the attending national press, with a rousing rendition of its famous Hello Song – Hello, Hello, Hello . . . The most beautiful word in the world is Hello – and asked us to join with him in singing the national anthem led by Jarrett Jackson, the only black person in the room, a waiter.
Romney is not exactly on what you’d call on a roll. Despite spending $24 million on TV ads, his campaign is a hare's breath away from tanking. So with a salesman’s ease he’s unveiling today a new theme (and new graphics) centered around, you guessed it, change.
In a dining room set with white linen tablecloths and overlooking the 18th green, he stands next to a huge TO DO list that looks like a blown-up post-it note. The message is that “Washington is broken” and it can’t be fixed by the same old Washington insiders (read John McCain) who live there.
The gist of the speech is a Babbitt-like rendition of the 13-points on his TO DO list. They are a laundry list of Republican catch phrases: Make America Safer, End Illegal Immigration, Reduce Taxes, Cut The Pork, Better Care for Veterans, End Dependence on Foreign Oil, Make Government Simpler, Fix Social Security, Strength Our Families, Balance The Budget, etc.
When Romney finishes, there is only polite applause. “Sounds to me like a PowerPoint presentation,” I whisper to Ron Brownstein, the chief political correspondent of The Los Angeles Times. “Actually, I think he’s done one of those,” he says.
A Note on Technology
The distance from the Nashua Country Club to Romney’s next stop at the Salem Elk’s Lodge is only nine miles as the crow flies but takes about 30 minutes to drive. The route zigzags along former carriage paths between villages, which is one reason why the newest gizmo in the press corps is a Global Positioning System.
Regulars on the campaign trail automatically order a GPS from the rental car company (at an extra fee of $10 a day), but, dumb me, I bought a map. In the parking lot, I ask the CNN truck engineer if he can show me how to get to the next stop. “Don’t ask me, I just GPS it,” he says.
At the next event, GPS comes up again. This time it is mentioned by a guy who is moonlighting from his job as an IT guru at Romney’s national call center in Salt Lake City. GPS, he says, lies at the very beating heart of every candidate’s central operation.
To explain: Like all the candidates, Romney has a national call center that uses computer phone software called VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol.)
For a license fee that amounts to $3 per seat (Skype Pro), it employs 100 volunteers a day to make toll free calls to anywhere in America. Free.
When a caller sits down at his workstation, he is fed the day’s call list from the campaign’s central computer database. It is loaded with the voter registration rolls in every county in America. One day, the volunteer can be calling the 17th precinct in the 3rd ward in Manchester; the next day, it’s the 33rd precinct in 5th ward of Greenville, South Carolina. Whom he calls that day is determined by the high command, which can re-direct the calls at the press of a button.
If the numbskull who answers the phone is willing to talk, the caller tries to extract from him the likelihood that he will vote for Romney. This data is then fed back into the central server, where respondents are divided into five categories:
1) Will Vote For Romney
2) Might Vote For Romney
3) Don’t Know
4) Don’t Like Romney
5) Won’t Vote
The old adage in Chicago politics is “Keep the ones and twos, throw out the fours and fives –– and fight over the threes.”
But here is where the Romney campaign has taken this to the next level. Through its own proprietary software (leave it to a venture capitalist to invest in software, if this politics thing doesn't work out), programmers can link this data to GPS maps of each precinct.
On Election Day, the central server will spit out a walking around map for precinct workers that shows them the name, address and other information (needs ride to polls) of Romney supporters.
The printout even includes instructions on the fastest route between houses.
“It says stuff like go 200 feet, turn left, ring doorbell at the third house on the left, say hello to Mr. Jones,” he said.
Along with the map, workers also are given scripts on what they should say to the ones, twos and threes on their route.
"It’s pretty cool,” he said.
Tears on the Trail
While I was boning up on Romney, Hillary Clinton was in Portsmouth for a little get-to-know you coffee with selected friends. It was coup just to get in. But Marianne Perlong Young was familiar with coups. She’d shaken John Edwards hand. She was a blurry face behind Barack Obama in a New York Post cover photo. And now she had a chance to ask Hillary Clinton a question.
Hillary was late. Two hours late. It was bad enough that Young had to sit and wait in this little Café Espresso on the mall; worse yet that she had to do it under the glare of all this media attention.
She was hungry. So was Rob Johnson, the CBS2 correspondent covering the event. They sat down together to eat. She was worried about what question she should ask. She was wavering between asking something about the economy or health care. “Why don’t you ask something personal?” he suggested.
And that is the origin of The Question.
“As a woman I know it’s hard to get out of the house, hard to get ready. And my question is how do you do it?” Young asked.
The
Answer that shocked the world was:
“It’s not easy. It’s not easy.”
Backlash
I heard about the crying incident on the radio between Romney stops. This was a game changer. I immediately turned the car around and headed back to the Red Roof to channel switch my way around the evening news.
Although the incident topped the broadcasts, the anchors were skittish about placing too much emphasis on it. Some were old enough to remember the famous Muskie tears that ended his campaign in 1972, and the debate that followed over whether they were tears or snowflakes. Others pointed out that Clinton never actually cried (although the video footage clearly shows moistened red eyes.)
With only 22 minutes to recap the day’s events, it seemed like a moot point. All of the evening news shows had “exclusive” packages featuring their anchors out on the campaign trail –– NBC’s Brian Williams, for instance, spent the day on Barack Obama’s bus –– and there just wasn’t enough time to get into it.
After the evening news ended, the story moved over to the cable news channels. Cynics questioned whether the Café Espresso appearance wasn’t a calculated part of a new strategy to soften Clinton’s images. Hillary loyalists pointed out how long and grueling the campaign had been. But neither seemed sure whether it worked to her advantage or disadvantage. In the end, the media consensus crystallized around the notion it was “a humanizing moment.”
When Clinton appeared on Good Morning America Tuesday to rehash it with Diane Sawyer, one more thing became clear:
The New Hampshire primary would be a referendum on Hillary’s character, and the deciding vote belonged to women.
Can The Media Ever Get It Right?
I spent Election Day driving around getting credentials for Clinton and Obama’s victory parties. Oh, how I wished I paid that extra $10 for a GPS. But when I saw the meager spread at the feed tables at both sites, I retreated back to the Red Roof to watch on TV.
The last polls taken before the election gave Obama a comfortable 10-12 point lead so over 600 reporters jammed into his election night headquarters to be present at his ascension to front runner.
But at 10:31 (EST), The Associated Press declared Hillary Clinton the winner in New Hampshire; and, for the second time in five days, the Democratic race for the presidency underwent a seismic shift.
The most interesting aspect of the evening was that to make the call, the wire service had to wait until more than 60% of the votes were actually counted –– because the exit polls too had shown that Obama would win.
And for the second time in five days, the national news networks found themselves reporting on an election that took place in a parallel universe to the real one. All they really had to go on for much of the night were those exit polls.
On the one hand, the exit polls showed that Obama again bested Clinton among young voters under 30 by a margin of 51 to 28 percent. On the other, Clinton regained her edge among women 47 percent to 34 percent.
Obama won among independents; but Clinton prevailed among Democrats, especially blue collar Democrats who earn less than $50,000 a year. And so went the dissection of the data, with very flashy graphics, while the actual returns came in.
But in the real election that took place that day something quite different was happening. Over 500,000 people turned out to vote at the polls, eclipsing the previous record of 396,000. Tom Brokaw noted the high turnout on MSNBC and attributed it, in part, to the proliferation this year of media.
“You have to realize we’re not the only channel on the air right now. When you have all this media surrounding you, you get excited. Also, with the young people, political commentary on the Internet has grown exponentially. There are so many blogs out there generating interest that it’s a new day.”
But it was good old-fashioned organization that carried it.
The Clinton vote was especially heavy in Manchester and Nashua, two large cities where the Clinton forces deployed most of their army of 6,000 door-to-door canvassers. And Obama’s hopes for a high turnout on the college campuses never panned out. In a nutshell, Obama lost New Hampshire because the kids didn’t turn out.
So the ghost of politics past isn’t completely dead, even if The Wayfarer Inn is. You still have to count the votes.
See you on the tarmac.
