The Saga of January 5th

Talk about one hell of a Saturday!

The morning started out with the regular routine that we've begun to get accustomed to: wake up at 7 AM, get ready, and be in the lobby by 7:30 AM for whatever was planned. Today, after our carb-only Best Western continental breakfast, we were treated to a guest lecture from Dante Scala, the author of one of our course texts and somebody recognized as an expert on the New Hampshire primary.

During this talk, we discussed how various primary candidates appeal to different regions and demographics in New Hampshire and how this might benefit their campaigns. A point of contention was that Dr. Scala sees Barack Obama's difficulty with black Democrats as arising from their concerns over Obama's electability among white voters. This is an entirely valid point of view, but my thoughts are that Barack Obama's problems with black Democrats is that your average black voter doesn't necessarily feel a common bond with the half-white and half-black, Hawaiian-raised, non-affirmative action Harvard-educated Obama. Basically, Obama has gotten the kiss of death inflicted upon many Southern candidates: an accurate statement that "he's not one of us."

Moving past Obama, Scala expressed some surprise that a strong demographic supporting Hillary Clinton is the working-class male. The surprise is that this gruff New England species supporting a female candidate for President of the United States. He did not offer any meaningful explanation of this, but I think that a recent trend in Pinellas County (FL) may explain why a decidedly masculine demographic would support the likes of Hillary Clinton. You see, there has been a bit of a gender revolution happening in Pinellas County. This revolution involves the significant electoral success of female candidates against established male candidates. On the Pinellas School Board in particular, females candidates with little to no financial support have triumphed against well-known, well-financed male candidates. What happened when the rubber hit the road in the voting booth was that male voters tended to pick the female candidate and female voters tended to pick the female candidate. My theory is that a matriarchal culture at work in working class families has driven this situation. Now, at this point, there does not seem to be a high amount of empirical evidence describing this phenomenon, but the presence of female candidates at all levels of elected politics may have a drastic effect on American politics if not further researched.

As Scala began speaking about the Republican primary, there was a sound similar to an old-fashioned vacuum cleaner permeating our conference room. After going on for a short while, Dr. McLauchlan stepped out and found that the fire alarm in the hotel was going off. About that time, things began to wrap up quickly and we started to leave the room. Walking outside, I was treated to the what is depicted in the pictures below. Smoke billowing from the hotel building and fire apparatus all over the place. About that time, we piled in to vans, drove around a police roadblock (with permission) and went to our campaign placements. I was dropped off at the Richardson South Nashua office and set to work making voter ID calls. After 20 minutes of calls, Dr. McLauchlan calls and tells me to be ready to be picked up and that we would be going to the hotel to retrieve our belongings. Pulling up to the hotel, it became obvious that we would no longer be staying at the Best Western this trip and set to figuring out what, if anything, we had left and where we would be staying.

Cutting past a lot of extra details, you can see what we walked back in to in some of the pictures below. There is one dark exposure picture that shows how dark it was inside of the hotel. There's also a picture of a hotel room so you can get an idea of how bad many of the rooms were. Fortunately, the sprinkler system did not activate in our room and hotel staff had hurriedly thrown all of our baggage on to a bed and covered it with a tarpaulin. So the good news is that there was no loss what so ever. Also, the hotel staff was very helpful with flashlights and garbage bags for our possessions.

Insofar as the cause of the fire, we did not get a solid answer except that it started in either a storage closet on the first floor or a boiler room on the second floor. We have gathered from the Union-Leader that this was a three alarm fire and I counted two ladder trucks, three fire engines, two ambulances, a fire squad truck, and the Salvation Army (which gave me a free blanket). Something else interesting about this is that a disaster response contractor checking out the damage to the building and planning repairs told me that the fire had been in the walls, floor space, and overhead crawl space. What it comes down to is that this was a very, very serious fire and that we were lucky that it happened after most of the patrons had left for the day and that nobody was hurt with the exception of one firefighter. This person was unnamed, but the Union-Leader said they were in stable condition at a local hospital.

Going to logistical matters, we are now staying in a Radisson hotel in Chelmsford, MA off of I-495 and, other than stuffy noses from the smoke this afternoon, all of the students seem to be doing well. This could have been much worse and we were very lucky that it happened when it did and how it did.

Interior Hotel Damage

Hotel Fire Pictures!!

Fun Activities

A bunch of folks have been asking me what exactly I've been up to in this frozen place. So here's what I've gotten to do:

-Putting down contact information for town clerks so that we can verify election day rules.
-Creating a campaign contact list for staff and interns.
-Putting rubber bands on brochures. (Lots and lots and lots of brochures)
-Assembling tons and tons of signs.
-Making lots and lots of phone calls.

Talk about good times! :-)

Truth be told, the voters in New Hampshire don't seem to be too different from primary voters in Florida. Same responses to the talking points and the same basic attitude to all of the phone calls they've been receiving. I think one big difference is that, in Florida, people will cuss the caller out and hang out. Here, they'll use issue-based cussing and criticize the candidate on a particular issue. It's just a strange little thing that people are so hyper-informed that they'll do that.

Campaign Pictures

A lovely picture of the front desk in the Nashua office.










Thought this would make a good picture that shows that campaign signs work in the snow too!

Here's the snow plow in the hotel parking lot. It's official that I have now seen more snow plows in three days than I have in my entire life up to this point in Florida.

In this picture, you will see the hotel parking lot with our two vans under about six inches of snow that we got the chance to dig out. I'm starting to think that snow isn't really all that awesome.