The hunt for the middle class is the centerpiece of the New Hampshire presidential campaign.
On Tuesday, slightly more than 100,000 Democrats and perhaps 125,000 Republicans will make their primary choices, along with a similar number of registered independents. It is likely most of them will be voting their economic hopes and fears.
Over the last eight weeks of this campaign, traditionally volatile primary issues like education, crime, abortion and race relations have been pushed to the margins.
”When you`re worried about the basics, the things you always took for granted, like a paycheck and some health insurance, the only thing you want to hear from these guys is what they`re going to do about it,” said Billy Frederick, an unemployed electrician from Nashua.
”Times are hard here right now, as hard as most people can remember,”
said former Republican Gov. Hugh Gregg, who is working for President Bush in the face of a challenge from conservative pundit Patrick Buchanan.
The deteriorating condition of this state`s economy, with record levels of bankruptcy and housing foreclosures, has forced the candidates to offer up specific and often detailed proposals for recovery.
The five major Democratic hopefuls have papered the state with bound copies of their ”growth packages” and proposals for revamping the American health care system, now as much an economic issue as a social one.
In crowds, coffee shops and commercials, the candidates are wooing the disaffected voters in working families, the group hit hardest by the deep recession in New England.
The partial text of a recent TV ad by Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton is not atypical of what New Hampshire voters are seeing, night after night.
”Our country`s in real trouble,” Clinton says. ”But our people haven`t failed, our leaders have. . . . Look what`s really at stake in this election: Your home, your job, your future.”
Democrats are engaged in their internal debate on dealing with the economy, but they rarely stray far from the central theme.
An Associated Press poll two weeks ago showed that 90 percent of the people surveyed thought of themselves as neither upper nor lower class, but right in the middle.
The government, represented by the Census Bureau and the Internal Revenue Service, does not define the middle class in terms of income.
However the middle class is defined, the problems of voters who feel themselves moving from the working class to the working poor will drive the results in both primaries here.
”We talk all the time about helping the middle class,” said Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, ”but what we don`t recognize is that the middle class is vanishing. It`s vanishing because we`ve forgotten what our parents did, the sacrifices they made, to build that middle class in the 1950s.”
Against that backdrop, it is more than geography that has transformed a colorless former one-term senator from neighboring Massachusetts into the current leader in the Democratic polls.
Paul Tsongas is a regional favorite, but he is also the current political beneficiary of economic hard times.
His take-your-medicine approach to the economy is evidently reaching voters here.
”I`m not Santa Claus,” he tells his audiences, and they seem to love the bad news. ”I`m not into providing tax breaks. You don`t build an economy with tax breaks and giveaways.”
Before Clinton`s campaign began to unravel in the wake of tabloid accusations of infidelity and questions about his draft record in the late 1960s, it was the five-term governor whose political skills and economic message were exciting the voters.
Clinton is working hard to rebound, but voters who traditionally decide late here have been moving not toward Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa or Kerrey but toward Tsongas.
At first blush, he makes an unlikely front-runner.
He fiercely opposes the middle-class tax cut favored by most Democrats and many Republicans, including the president. But Tsongas has managed, thus far, to turn that unorthodox stance to his advantage.
He has become, for better or worse, the serious candidate, the one many voters think is fully engaged in studying economic travails.
Harkin opposes the middle-class tax cut, he says, because he thinks it`s irrelevant, too little, too late for working families. Tsongas opposes it because he thinks it`s bad economics, ”a drain on the Treasury,” and the crowd roars.
Tsongas` hold on first place is tenuous, but these are palmy days for a candidate offering himself as a ”pro-business liberal.”
Around the state Tsongas now finds himself signing autographs on the 85-page pamphlet he named ”A Call to Economic Arms.” It is a document he spent 10 long months trying to give away as he campaigned in solitary last spring.
On the Republican side, the recession and a continuous pounding from Buchanan has forced Bush to abandon his ”stay the course” approach to the recession.
Campaigning in New Hampshire last week, Bush began talking about
”revolution,” attacking Congress, ”big government and protectionist ideas on trade, a selling point for his primary rival and his ”America First” message.
Buchanan, despite enormous pressure from conservative colleagues like Housing Secretary Jack Kemp who are backing Bush, is not shy about blaming the president for ”the depression” in New Hampshire.
”He`s the biggest taxer and the biggest spender in American history,”
Buchanan said of Bush.
That rhetoric is sweet music to New Hampshire conservatives, but polls show that many Republicans who backed Bush four years ago are painting the incumbent as a failed economic messenger.
Unemployment in this state, just 2.4 percent four years ago, has risen to the national average of slightly above 7 percent. Applications for food stamps have tripled since 1988.
Where there were 835 bankruptcies in the state four years ago, there were more than 3,800 last year. The southern New Hampshire landscape is littered with foreclosed homes, failed shopping centers and empty apartment complexes. Voters want attention paid, and any misstep in advancing the perception that a candidate listens and cares can be damaging.
Bush learned that on his first campaign swing through New Hampshire last month. A series of carefully staged events and an endlessly repeated ”I care” message did not sit well with discontented Republican voters.
Last week, Bush hit the cafes and shopping malls in a renewed attempt to connect with voters and their economic concerns.
It can be a hard sell, even for an incumbent president.
Touring Bedford Mall Wednesday, Bush gave an autograph to Bonnie Raymond, an out-of-work mother of two who gave the president her state unemployment identification book to sign.
”He didn`t see me, he didn`t see it,” Raymond told the Manchester Union Leader. ”His eyes are not open.”
If voters don`t sense that the eyes of the politicians are open they may well exact their revenge Tuesday.
