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(s)Elections See other (s)Elections Articles Title: First Notes from New Hampshire An unexpectedly exciting race sees Sanders undermining Hillary, and the GOP in tumult. I arrived in Manchester, New Hampshire late Tuesday night, my home for the next four weeks (see the above “view from my window” photo). An election which seemed impossibly dreary six or eight months ago has been astonishingly upended into one of the more interesting contests in my lifetime. I plan to follow the news closely, attend as many events and talk to as many people as I can, and relate what I see and hear. I suspect Sanders will win handily in New Hampshire, and neither he nor Hillary will spend huge amounts of time here. If she wins here against the Vermonter, his unlikely challenge will be more or less over. But what a surprising contest it has turned out to be. Like virtually everyone else in America, I had assumed Sanders would poll respectably against Hillary in a few states, and force her at least to pretend to take seriously the progressive base of the Democratic Party, for a while. The first debate, after which Hillary re-emerged with a comfortable lead in the polls, confirmed that. She seemed sharp and on her game, and Sanders was nice enough to let her off the hook on her “damn emails” and that would be that. Over Christmas, I heard odd glimmers of Sanders enthusiasm—the favorite of every MFA student at the University of Alabama according to a daughter, not perhaps the most representative demographic. A surprisingly bullish estimate of his chances comes from Jack Ross, author of a new and monumental history of the Socialist Party of America. But that Hillary was a weak candidate is not a surprise. She is clearly intelligent, and evidently inspires fierce loyalty from those who know her well. But she doesn’t appear really to have principles, or certainly not the kind that might inspire most Democrats. Against inequality accelerated in America, she spoke for the victors. After her uninspired tenure at Foggy Bottom, she enriched herself with $3 million from a dozen Wall Street speeches, a kind of way the big bucks folks reward politicians who promise do their bidding. No one opposes people getting financially rewarded for superior accomplishment, but what really was being paid for here? That Haim Saban, the zillionaire who cares only for Israel and favors war against Iran, is her campaign’s biggest financial backer is not irrelevant either. And yet her nomination seemed such a foregone conclusion, until, suddenly, a Sanders surge in Iowa, the reminder no one loses both Iowa and New Hampshire and goes on to win the nomination, and Joe Biden’s subtle shiv that Hillary’s interest in income inequality has not really defined her career, and there’s a real race. Chelsea Clinton is sent up to New Hampshire as an attack dog—“Bernie Sanders wants to take away your Medicare” in so many words. The question is whether enthusiasm for Hillary among her core supporters, professional women of a certain age, is sufficient to sustain her. Could she be beaten by a 74 year-old Socialist? It seems really unlikely. Could she be so wounded as to make clear to Democratic powers-that-be that she is not an appropriate party leader, opening the field to Biden or someone else? Today that hardly seems impossible. I expect much movement on the Republican side in the coming weeks. There is a sorting going on. In my hotel bar, a Cruz staffer was schmoozing with the former leader of one of the Carson super PACs, now sporting a Cruz button, a defection bringing to the Cruz New Hampshire campaign a handful of minor elected officials and organizers, numbers which might be meaningful to a small state campaign. A truism in politics is that no one wants to be spend their time on meaningless campaigns, however unfair it might be that the campaigns are so designated. Carson’s organization may well be on the cusp of implosion. After him, who else? In any case, it seems likely that the divisions which have thus far aided Donald Trump’s poll numbers—the “right wing” vote split between Cruz, Carson, Paul, Huckabee, and Santorum; the “establishment” vote divided between Rubio, Bush, Christie, and Kasich, may be smoothed over even before the voters of Iowa and New Hampshire do their first shuffle. Scott McConnell is a founding editor of The American Conservative. Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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