What's the Matter with NH?
I'm about 40 topics behind right now, so much so that I've almost lost my motivation to keep posting. Also, today is the 20th anniversary of President Ronald Reagan's speech at Brandenburg Gate when he demanded that Gorbachev tear down the Berlin Wall and I'm preparing a speech to deliver on the floor of the NH House tomorrow, so I'm pretty busy.
In any case, I saw this article from Reason Magazine and I thought it fairly accurately captured what's going on in NH right now: What's the matter with New Hampshire?
The Republicans won or held their own in New Hampshire for decades based, it was thought, on opposition to taxes. The Union Leader newspaper backed anti-tax Republican Meldrim Thompson through 1968 and 1970 losses in the party primaries to liberal Republican Walter Peterson. (The second time he sore-losered his way onto the ballot as the candidate of George Wallace's American Independent Party.) The third time, in 1972, he won and credited taking the paper's anti-sales tax, anti-income tax pledge for his victory. Thirty-five years later the state still eschews those taxes, and the GOP offers a bumper sticker map of New England with two colors: high-tax neighbors in blue, no-hassle New Hampshire in red.
It's a great issue that no longer works for the party. The Democrats have simply evolved, nuancing the tax issue and promising, like current, more-popular-than-Jesus Gov. John Lynch, not to bring a sales tax to the Granite state. "When the Democratic candidate pledges not to raise taxes, the issue is off the table," Cullen says. "We can't win on it."
From the article:
Finessing that issue and riding the unpopularity of the reigning party put the Democrats in charge. And in between their vigorous torchings of Republican effigies, Democrats have used their clout to pass laws anathema to that other creature of cliché, the New Hampshire individualist. The anti-war, small-government voter who wanted to register disgust with the GOP wrangled a Democratic legislature that's dramatically shifted the center of state politics. Civil unions for gay couples were legalized and signed by Gov. Lynch. The state House passed a seatbelt bill and a bill to ban smoking in bars. Both were squelched, barely, by the Democratic Senate. (The smoking ban has passed the House again, however, and is tipped to go all the way.) One of the Republicans who killed the smoking ban gave a sorrowful quote to the New York Times: "I'm surprised that a lot of the 'Live Free or Diers' who usually confront us with statements like 'stay out of our life' or 'we don't need more legislation' were the ones asking us to ban smoking."
So the state's voters absorbed two lessons since the Democratic takeover. The first is that the Democrats' evolution on taxes occurred in a vacuum, and on the typical "nanny" issues the party's reading from the same hymn book as those other New England liberals. The second is that petty individual rights are still overwhelmingly popular in the state. Republicans glow when talking about the way the new bosses have "overreached," seeing the issues that will yank them out of a prematurely dug grave.
...
(Well, at least we don't have lunatic judges suing dry cleaners for tens of millions of dollars over a pair of pants...)
In any case, I saw this article from Reason Magazine and I thought it fairly accurately captured what's going on in NH right now: What's the matter with New Hampshire?
The Republicans won or held their own in New Hampshire for decades based, it was thought, on opposition to taxes. The Union Leader newspaper backed anti-tax Republican Meldrim Thompson through 1968 and 1970 losses in the party primaries to liberal Republican Walter Peterson. (The second time he sore-losered his way onto the ballot as the candidate of George Wallace's American Independent Party.) The third time, in 1972, he won and credited taking the paper's anti-sales tax, anti-income tax pledge for his victory. Thirty-five years later the state still eschews those taxes, and the GOP offers a bumper sticker map of New England with two colors: high-tax neighbors in blue, no-hassle New Hampshire in red.
It's a great issue that no longer works for the party. The Democrats have simply evolved, nuancing the tax issue and promising, like current, more-popular-than-Jesus Gov. John Lynch, not to bring a sales tax to the Granite state. "When the Democratic candidate pledges not to raise taxes, the issue is off the table," Cullen says. "We can't win on it."
From the article:
Finessing that issue and riding the unpopularity of the reigning party put the Democrats in charge. And in between their vigorous torchings of Republican effigies, Democrats have used their clout to pass laws anathema to that other creature of cliché, the New Hampshire individualist. The anti-war, small-government voter who wanted to register disgust with the GOP wrangled a Democratic legislature that's dramatically shifted the center of state politics. Civil unions for gay couples were legalized and signed by Gov. Lynch. The state House passed a seatbelt bill and a bill to ban smoking in bars. Both were squelched, barely, by the Democratic Senate. (The smoking ban has passed the House again, however, and is tipped to go all the way.) One of the Republicans who killed the smoking ban gave a sorrowful quote to the New York Times: "I'm surprised that a lot of the 'Live Free or Diers' who usually confront us with statements like 'stay out of our life' or 'we don't need more legislation' were the ones asking us to ban smoking."
So the state's voters absorbed two lessons since the Democratic takeover. The first is that the Democrats' evolution on taxes occurred in a vacuum, and on the typical "nanny" issues the party's reading from the same hymn book as those other New England liberals. The second is that petty individual rights are still overwhelmingly popular in the state. Republicans glow when talking about the way the new bosses have "overreached," seeing the issues that will yank them out of a prematurely dug grave.
...
(Well, at least we don't have lunatic judges suing dry cleaners for tens of millions of dollars over a pair of pants...)