All hail New Hampshire’s ‘pipsqueak press’
One journalist’s account of the 2008 presidential primary at a small-town New Hampshire paper
By Felice Belman
There was a time when the irascible publisher of the Manchester Union Leader dismissed his competition in New Hampshire’s smaller cities as the “pipsqueak press.”
But there was also a time, not too long past, when an endorsement from the pipsqueak press was highly coveted by those seeking the White House. The newspapers — the Concord Monitor, the Keene Sentinel, the Portsmouth Herald, and others — each sold just 20,000 or 30,000 copies a day at their peak. But candidates looking for an edge believed that those readers might just make the difference between winning the first-in-the-nation presidential primary and not.
Never was the campaign strategy of shamelessly sucking up to the local press on greater display than in the Democratic primary of 2008, the race that pitted Barack Obama against Hillary Clinton and a large cast of also-rans.
The Concord Monitor, where I worked, was slow to endorse that year, in part because the five-member editorial board was genuinely split between Obama and Clinton. The campaigns knew it, and it appeared to be driving them bananas. In the early months, they sent big-name emissaries — diplomats Madeleine Albright and Richard Holbrooke among them — to make the case for their candidates. VIP supporters flooded the paper with hyperbolic letters to the editor. Clinton even sent me a personal letter congratulating me on a workplace promotion — on real paper, with an apparently real signature, pre-private e-mail server.
But one extraordinary week, just before the January election, brought us unprecedented, nearly ridiculous access to the man who would soon become president and the woman now hoping to succeed him.
Early in the week, Clinton came to the newspaper for a scheduled hourlong interview and ended up sticking around for 90 minutes. The next day, Obama arrived, also keen for the paper’s support. When he started to wrap it up after 45 minutes or so, an editor passed a note to his aide, letting him know how much time Clinton had given us, and — like magic — Obama settled back in for another long stretch of questions and answers.
The next day, in the seat where Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama once sat, was Bill Clinton, just stopping by to make the case for his wife. He gave us two hours of his time, ruminating on everything from the Danish economy to job creation in the United Kingdom and, oh yes, the Hillary campaign. (“If people think she’s a little too edgy, I’d ask them to just remember what she’s been through in the last 15 years,” he told us.)
The wooing didn’t end there. When Bill Clinton left, I found a voicemail message on my office phone from Obama. He knew that endorsement decision was coming, he said sheepishly, and just wanted to make sure I didn’t have further questions for him. So needy! So flattering! So absurd!
And when my home phone rang that Saturday morning — before 8 a.m.! — Hillary was improbably (inevitably?) on the other end. I interviewed her in my pajamas, preposterously annoyed that the former first lady of the United States had woken me on a day off.
In the end, Clinton got the endorsement and won the primary, too. Obama won the nomination and the White House. And the Monitor editorial board had an opportunity afforded to few other tiny newsrooms in the country.
New Hampshire journalists are among the fiercest defenders of the state’s coveted first-in-the-nation primary. It’s not hard to appreciate why.
Felice Belman can be reached at felice.belman@globe.com.
Originally published at www.bostonglobe.com on October 8, 2015.
