Grassroots campaigning runs deep in N.H.

[William769]

Like most relatively sane members of the human race, I don't normally pay much attention to political campaign endorsements. They are mostly a dime a dozen and rarely guarantee much in terms of actual votes at the polls.

The endorsement circus sometimes leads to hilarious political contortion acts. One wonders what was going through Sen. John McCain's mind when he became an enthusiastic embracer of President George Bush in 2004 — just a few years after a nasty primary fight in which McCain barely hid his contempt for Bush and his entitlement campaign theme ("I'm entitled and you're not" was Bush's unsaid but clearly evident modus operandi during that primary fight — a true foreshadowing of what was to come from the "decider-in-chief").

In 1996, the folks of New Hampshire yawned while then-popular Gov. Steve Merrill publicly mulled an endorsement for a Republican hopeful. Merrill eventually chose Sen. Robert Dole, which prompted insurgent candidate Pat Buchanan to quip that the Merrill had chosen warmed-over milk rather than champagne. Buchanan scored an upset victory over Dole, Steve Forbes and the rest of the GOP gang, which proved the true worth of Merrill's endorsement — and showed for the first time on the Republican side the power of a spontaneous grassroots wildfire, one that McCain stoked to victory as well in 2000.

Back now to the moral of this story. I did raise an eyebrow when one Roger Goun of Brentwood came out and publicly endorsed Sen. Hillary Clinton for president. While nationally this proclamation may equate to a thumbs-up from the owner of Bob's Auto Shop, the Clinton campaign scored a minor public relations coup in Goun because he's a new-breed activist with no shortage of connections in the state's growing and increasingly influential progressive grassroots community.

Goun is a former software engineer turned full-time political actor these days. He's chairman of the Brentwood Town Committee and is running for the state Senate. He's also a newcomer who cut his teeth on the grassroots roller coaster of the Howard Dean campaign in 2003. He and other committed activists co-founded Democracy for New Hampshire, and decided to brawl in the dirt of state politics. By 2006, their activism matched in sync with a ripe political environment to help create a stunning electoral transformation — Paul Hodes and Carol Shea-Porter defeated two well-entrenched incumbents for Congress and the Democrats won control of the state House and Senate for the first time in decades.

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