Most of the rest of America still hasn’t tuned in to the presidential campaign. CNN’s cablecasts of last week’s “town hall” candidate forums at Dartmouth College drew fewer viewers than “Dawson’s Creek” reruns. But, exempting the upcoming holiday seasons, there are a scant eight campaign weeks until the nomination race actually begins. And in places like Iowa and New Hampshire, the pace is intense. The candidates are thick upon the ground and, increasingly, in ads on local television.
Ground zero of the fast-approaching presidential campaign is on Main Street, among the dutiful, skeptical, swing-voting independents of places like Nashua. Drawn to the action late in the game, these voters give front runners fits, and presage trends that appear nationwide later. And there are more independents than ever before. At 36 percent of the electorate, they are now more numerous in New Hampshire than either the Republicans or Democrats. Party allegiance is declining everywhere, but New Hampshirites already have arrived where America as a whole seems to be heading. “The independents are crucial here,” said Tom Rath, a longtime leader of the New Hampshire GOP. “They make you, or break you.”
For now, at least, independents seem intrigued by an informal, cross-party Bradley-McCain alliance. In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, Vice President Al Gore leads Bradley nationally by 40 to 25 percent among Democrats. Though Bradley didn’t gain ground last week, Gore lost 9 percentage points in the Democratic race. And in New Hampshire, Bradley has moved into the lead in most polls. In the GOP contest, Texas Gov. George W. Bush continues to clobber all comers. He inherited most of Elizabeth Dole’s support, and lengthened his lead over the second-place McCain to 63 to 12 percent. But up in New Hampshire, McCain is cutting into Bush’s lead, and has emerged as his main rival.
What’s going on? In New Hampshire, voters love to send a message to the perceived powers that be. In the old days–starting in 1980–the message was: fix the economy. The state was mired in a slow, painful transition from mill wheels to multimedia. Nashua’s Main Street was dotted with empty storefronts when Ronald Reagan came there to upset the front runner at the time, George H. W. Bush. The town looked the same in 1984, when young baby-boomer families flooded the polls to support Gary Hart over Walter Mondale–and signal the demise of the old, union-driven Democratic Party. In 1992 Pat Buchanan capitalized on recession and trade fears to expose President Bush’s weakness.
But now the emerging concerns seem more personal, and sometimes less tangible: health care, education standards and the ethics of our leaders. The Digital Revolution has resuscitated New Hampshire, which has more modems per household than any state besides Alaska. Today, on Main Street in Nashua, mom-and-pop consulting companies and coffee bars line gentrified blocks decorated with restored fountains and new flower beds. Here, where aging baby-boomer families are being replaced by Gen-Xers such as the Houdes, it’s all about quality of life, quality of leadership and the renewal of community pride.
Voters are intrigued by Bradley and by McCain more for the aura than the specifics. The two challengers seem to be quirky, nonpolitical types with compellingly nonpolitical stories to tell. This year, it seems, it’s the narrative, stupid. In a country obsessed with fame and biography, the lives of Bill Bradley and John McCain are rich, useful campaign material, consistent with the themes the candidates are espousing: Bradley, a former NBA star, extols the virtues of teamwork; McCain, the former POW, credibly appeals for patriotic sacrifice.
At Dartmouth, Bradley spoke in New Age tones about the soothing virtues of viewing nature’s wonders. The next morning he sounded like a secular preacher at Martha’s Exchange in Nashua. “If we work together as citizens,” he told a rapt crowd, “we can reach a level of self-fulfillment as citizens that we’ve never known.” McCain, as passionate as Bradley is austere, spoke to software executives later that day at the Nashua Marriott. He ended a speech about bandwidth and encryption by promising to inspire Americans to “devote themselves to a cause greater than themselves.” In the meantime, he said, he would fight “until my last breath” to banish dirty cash in politics.
McCain, in fact, wants to make the informal alliance into an explicit one. Campaign-finance reform is the centerpiece of his bid, and he repeatedly reminds voters that President Clinton and Newt Gingrich, who was then House speaker, came to New Hampshire in 1995 and shook hands on a pledge to reform the system. Nothing’s happened. McCain, NEWSWEEK has learned, has privately appealed to Bradley to join him in re-creating the event–and in making the same pledge again. “It would be great for the cause of reform,” McCain told NEWSWEEK. So far, it’s no deal: Bradley and McCain are competing for support of the same independents next Feb. 1.
In fact, though both are running as reform-minded outsiders, neither really is. McCain has used his position as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee to vacuum up campaign contributions from executives of media companies he oversees. Bradley, for his part, depicts the time he spent since leaving the Senate in 1996 as soul-cleansing Wanderjahren: on the road in the real America. But Bradley’s 1997 and 1998 tax returns, obtained by NEWSWEEK, tell the rest of the story. In those two years Bradley’s most lucrative job was to give pricey speeches to business groups and to consult with major Wall Street houses. He earned a gross income of $5.2 million, including $2.7 million from speeches and $800,000 in fees from Morgan Guarantee Trust Co. and the J. P. Morgan Bank.
Nor are Bradley and McCain averse to using tools of the insider’s game. Though they pride themselves on not having conducted polls, the Bradley campaign, NEWSWEEK has learned, recently put together at least one focus group in New Hampshire. Bradley is also about to name an ad team that will include New York advertising executive Linda Kaplan Thaler. Among her clients: Nice ’n Easy hair color. As for McCain, he’s now running radio spots in New Hampshire, and he’s hired the GOP’s most manic spin doctor, Mike Murphy.
Inside the front runners’ camps, no one is professing alarm. Al Gore’s team thinks Bradley can be had. For now, they concede, the former senator runs more strongly among independents than the veep, especially among baby-boomer males who remember his basketball career. That will change, they say, when voters realize how liberal Bradley is on issues such as welfare, federal spending and gay rights. However, they say, Bradley isn’t liberal enough for many traditional Democrats, since he has supported school-voucher experiments and the original Reagan budget cuts. “He’s having it both ways, but eventually he won’t have it either way,” vows a top Gore aide.
As for McCain, those in the Bush camp back in Texas sound blase. “McCain’s a quirky guy with a great story, and he’s likable,” said one top Bush adviser. “He’s passionate, and believable. But he’s basing his campaign entirely on campaign-finance reform and, frankly, there just aren’t enough people who care about it to make a difference.” Maybe so, but that’s up to the people on Main Street in Nashua to decide.
