At a time when my mailbox is groaning with correspondents berating the nincompoops of New Hampshire, Rob Long (the Hollywood branch of the Goldberg-Long-Steyn axis of evil) has an alternative view:
In Hollywood, everyone’s a Democrat except for a few of us… “You know,” a reporter once said to me, “I can’t figure you out. You’re a Republican, but you’re, like, not reprehensible.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“No, seriously,” she went on. “I don’t hate you. Isn’t that weird?”
So it was fun to hang out for a few days in an intensely political atmosphere and see people – not just see them, but eat with them, drink (a lot) with them – from all spots on the political map getting along, discussing, debating the merits of this candidate or that. No one called anyone else a fascist. No one expected anyone else to be reprehensible. The Ron Paul guys drank with the Kucinich guys. The Obama guys helped the Romney guys put a few signs in a high snowbank.
The union crowd that piled into a hotel ballroom to cheer at a Clinton rally spilled over into the ballroom where I was participating in a panel discussion – the categorical opposite of a Hillary Clinton rally, trust me – and…nothing. They ate some free food, had a few beers, hung around for some of the jokes. If that had somehow happened here, it would have been a six-act play: demonstrations, denunciations, all of that crap.
I like New Hampshire.
So do I. In this part of the state, some of the candidate signs will sometimes topple from the snowbanks and lurch at alarming angles into the road and so the plow trucks scoop ‘em and take ‘em to the highway garage, which can be some distance away. A guy I know who’s on the Ron Paul campaign, and who drives down to the garage and picks up his signs and always picks up those of his next-door neighbor, who’s on the Clinton campaign, and drops ‘em off at her place to save her the trip. If you’ll forgive a teary chokey Hilly moment, I wish we had a bit more of that.