New Hampshire: Giving the People What They Want... Times Two

By P.J. O'Rourke

I've been voting in New Hampshire primaries for 32 years. But I've never seen a race as strange as this.

The choice was supposed to be between names from the past: a Bush and a Clinton. Instead, New Hampshire has left American political elites and political pundits in a state of disbelief.

In America, we like to say: "Anyone can become president." This year, we've been trying to prove it.

Over the past two weeks, I followed candidates around New Hampshire as they shook hands and smiled until their faces cracked, hoping to persuade my state's infamously late-deciding voters.

To the rest of the world, Donald Trump may seem like a joke. And there are many Republicans saying, "Please, let's hope he is."

But is Trump just a prank the American electorate is pulling on the American political establishment?

To put it in the worst light, a lot of people are claiming to support a cartoon character – an overconfident Mr. Bluster, a self-inflated one-man business boom who claims he can make a deal with the devil that will have the angels of heaven lining up to buy condos in Trump Tower Hell.

But like many jokes, Trump is a manifestation of serious, heartfelt discomfort and anxiety. Trump's supporters are earnestly concerned about what's happening to their country.

America is actually a pretty good place. By world-historical standards, it's an excellent place. And yet, according to opinion polls, almost two-thirds of Americans think the country is "on the wrong track."

What has Americans so worried? The technological revolution is unsettling, as are rapid social shifts involving everything from immigrants to gender and sexuality. The middle class has been squeezed. Wages haven't kept up. The divide between the very rich and the very poor continues to grow. And America's political establishment is so bitterly divided that we can't get bipartisan agreement on whether the sun will come up.

One of the first candidates I had a chance to see was Ted Cruz. He's a conservative candidate in a more traditional mold than Trump.

Cruz is a cultural conservative, strongly opposed to gay rights, drug-law reform, and so forth. He's still fighting the Culture Wars. He's up on the front line bravely firing away without noticing that the other side has gone home to celebrate victory with legalized marijuana at same-sex wedding receptions.

In New Hampshire, however, Cruz was emphasizing defense of constitutional limits on government power more than he was emphasizing defense of traditional social values.

When Cruz was in his teens – before going to Princeton, then Harvard, then becoming a U.S. senator – he was part of a group of students called the "Constitutional Corroborators." They would tour civic organizations in Texas and deliver half-hour presentations on the U.S. Constitution from memory. (What I was doing as teenager was somewhat different, but then, I'm not running for office. And the Constitution is a big vote-getter among New Hampshirites.)

Except for Trump and Cruz, the Republican candidates were what might be called the "Muddle in the Middle." Moderate Republicans kept waiting for one of them to set him or herself apart from the crowd.

John Kasich, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, and Chris Christie are seasoned, pragmatic, center-right candidates. Before she dropped out of the race, Carly Fiorina was the same, plus being a woman, minus the seasoning.

In Milford, New Hampshire, I caught a bit of Chris Christie. But the crowd seemed to be not so much there to support the candidate as there looking for a candidate to support. Apparently, most decided that candidate wasn't Christie. He suspended his campaign after getting 7% of the vote in New Hampshire.

Jeb Bush was another candidate who inspired mild interest rather than wild enthusiasm.

There's something about Jeb that I think of as the "Great American Failure Story." Here's Jeb with all the Bush influence, all the Bush political connections, all the Bush campaign funding, and he can't seem to make much headway. This kind of failure would be almost impossible for the son of a rich, aristocratic family anywhere else in the world. Isn't America a wonderful country?

Marco Rubio is young (by political standards) and fresh-faced (by political standards). Middle-of-the-road Republicans hoped he would emerge as vigorously moderate or, at least, moderately vigorous.

But Rubio faltered at a debate three days before the primary. He suffered from a form of stuttering. Except, instead of repeating a sound, he repeated a whole chunk of campaign boilerplate several times in a row. Then he did the same thing again the next day. The effect was disconcerting – indicative, at the very least, of nervous inexperience on the campaign stump.

Ohio governor John Kasich placed second in the Republican primary. I confess I was a little surprised. I hadn't been paying much attention to Kasich, who looks as much like a generic candidate for president as a generic candidate for president can look.

But Kasich is the popular conservative governor of Ohio, a not-so-conservative state.

Ohio is a microcosm of American conflicts: labor versus management, nativists versus immigrants, blacks versus whites, "Occupy Akron" versus "the 1%." They all hate each other, but they don't hate Kasich.

Kasich beat an incumbent Democratic governor and was re-elected by a landslide. Before that, he served nine terms shoveling important manure in the House of Representatives' barn. He was on the House Armed Services Committee for 18 years and spent six years as the chairman of the House Budget Committee.

Kasich is a good candidate. But he came in a distant second to Trump. It seems that Republicans are in no damn mood for a competent, experienced politician with broad popular appeal.

New Hampshire was not, of course, just about the Republicans. The Democrats were having a primary, too. And the same dynamic was at work – political insiders versus political outsiders (though just one of each in the Democrats' case).

However, when it comes to being an "establishment" Democrat, Hillary is probably the most established Democrat on Earth.

And her opponent was Bernie Sanders. He may have been involved in politics all his life, but he's an outsider's outsider because of his political ideas, which are way out in left field.

Bernie repeats the pieties of the 1960s New Left with a straight face. Trump can be clownish. Bernie is perfectly deadpan.

Most of Bernie's support comes from people who weren't born when his ideas were in vogue. They're too young to know that what Bernie says may sound like it makes sense during the dorm-room bull session, but sooner or later, you have to put the bong down and exhale.

Bernie is hardly the right man to break America's political deadlock. It would be like electing Angela Merkel as Prime Minister of Greece.

Hillary, on the other hand, is a seasoned, pragmatic, center-left candidate. Her nomination by the Democratic Party was supposed to be inevitable. But it turns out that "evitable" is a real word in the English language. I checked the dictionary. We should start using it.

In the morning on the day before the Primary, I went to a Hillary event. It was held in the auditorium of a junior college. In the evening, I went to a Trump event. It was held at a sports arena.

Several hundred people came to see Hillary. It wasn't much fun. At least 5,000 people came to see Trump. Fun was had.

What Trump presented was more of a performance than a political rally. What Trump had to say was more of a shoutout to his fans than a speech to his political supporters. And there was great music. The loudspeakers in the sports arena boomed with early Rolling Stones, Elton John, and "Revolution" from the Beatles' White Album...

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao,

You ain't going to make it with anyone anyhow.

On primary night, the voting trend was so clear that the Associated Press declared Donald Trump the winner of the Republican primary two minutes after the polls closed. And Bernie Sanders was anointed the Democratic victor just as quickly.

American voters want a different kind of presidential candidate than they've ever seen before.

And here in New Hampshire, we've certainly given America what it wants – times two.

Regards,

P.J. O'Rourke