Hodes versus Ayotte, 2010 NH Senate Race

This year’s New Hampshire senate race is shaping up to be a critical one, as it is a referendum on our willingness to offer some modicum of resistance shouted from our prodigious hilltops to what seems a precipitous, and in my opinion, overly zealous tilt to the right, versus our willingness to go along with it, thus rendering our individual voice and the nuance of our arguments unheard. New Hampshire’s political personality has always been at best thoughtfully independent and at worst wonderfully cantankerous. We lose our bully pulpit by electing Ayotte.


What we will condone politically this November seems tangled up in why we will condone it. The Republican candidate is in the mold of the GOP’s best recent success model, an attractive, traditional conservative female who embraces the religious right. The reason we may elect her is because we are so darn mad that we are maybe even ready to vote for something we don’t endorse. I don’t think that’s a good idea.

The Republican machine will expect a rubber stamp from Kelly Ayotte if she is elected, and they will most likely receive it. And what table scraps would New Hampshire receive in exchange for its presumed capitulation? For the first two years, not much, then in the event of a Republican break point in 2012, an extra road here or there, a photo op with the big cheese, and maybe some property tax when America’s wealthiest can afford another mountain cabin or condo in Portsmouth.

Additionally, Ayotte’s position on abortion is a stone wall, and as such will win a certain gift basket of some number of single issue voters. While Kelly Ayotte’s potential influence on the abortion debate has little chance of being directly impactful to Roe v. Wade’s survival, the way these larger questions are dismantled is with smaller toeholds along the way. New Hampshire’s political personality is best summed up in our state’s motto, Live Free or Die, and Ayotte’s stated desire to revoke a woman’s right to choose stands in dramatic contrast to New Hampshire’s tradition of personal liberty.

A plucky, feisty prosecutor, cuter than most, her tenacity for her in my opinion misguided positions on both economic and social issues, is admirable. Her resume is born of a series of appointed positions and a dramatic resignation over Governor Lynch;s endorsement of a same sex marriage initiative. Appointed officials generally have less experience building consensus than elected officials do, but short of senatorial material among New Hampshire’s GOP ranks, the powers that be and the state’s Republican primary voters have settled for Palin Lite this year.

The other side of the race features Paul Hodes. Sure, I’m traditionally a Democrat, and I cop to having a sufficiently left lean that I was easy to tip, but I have voted for Judd Gregg before, and cannot be accurately called a straight ticket voter. Hodes is a level-headed, reasonable man, absent conspicuous religiosity and the hysteria that is never far away from it. Hodes’ resume seems to have a more sturdily built foundation than his opponent’s, and having run a campaign and served a constituency, he is more prepared for the senate than is his opponent.

I believe in equal rights for goose and gander, so it is fair to ask if Hodes will be a rubber stamp for the Obama administration’s executive agenda, and I think the honest answer is that no, he will not. Hodes is a skilled, honest and respectful debater, and my sense is that he addresses issues methodically and on their own merits rather than overlaying a template of accumulated previous perceptions. In this way, Hodes more fully embodies the Live Free or Die credo than Ayotte does. Paul Hodes would speak to Washington in the same polite but no-nonsense tone with which most of my New Hampshire friends speak to me. It’s too cold up here for any BS.