I am a bit disturbed at the new initiative of our former Chair of the NHDP, Kathy Sullivan, to draft Jeanne Shaheen to run against Sununu. (http://www.bluehampshire.com/showDiary.d
o?diaryId=1132) As many of you know, there was a bit of uprising of the grassroots in NH last year, especially in the First District, where Carol Shea Porter and her amazing team (of which I was a small part) won on a pittance (under $250K) against Jeb Bradley. I was very pleased when I attended the NHDP Convention last weekend as a town chair to hear Ray Buckley tell those of us who attended the grassroots organizing party building session that the grassroots was going to have a lot of help this cycle, that the party was now bottom-up and not top-down.
We have three interesting people already declared for this race: Jay Buckey, a former astronaut and professor of medicine at Dartmouth (
http://www.buckey08.com/) who just declared his candidacy, Katrina Swett, wife of former Congressman and Ambassador Dick Swett (
http://www.swettforsenate.com/), and Steve Marchand, mayor of Portsmouth NH (
http://www.stevemarchand2008.net/). They are all good candidates and can rouse the grassroots against Sununu.
I am very concerned that the old establishment in the NHDP will decide, as they have many times in the past, that they know best who should run, who is "electable." They are famous for losing elections in NH, and they cannot take any credit, as far as I am concerned, for the Democratic sweep in NH in 2006. That was partly Bush, but it was also partly Dr. Dean's initiative to get us more staffing at the party, and a great deal grassroots enthusiasm.
One of my concerns is that Kathy has a lot of contacts in the media, and many people are not paying attention yet, and may not realize that we already have some great people already geared up for the primary in the fall of 2008. I don't want to see some sort of coup, where the others will feel they have to bow out because "of course Jeanne is the best candidate." She has a lot of baggage on both sides of the aisle, as will anyone who has been in the limelight in the past. And she lost the Senate race to Sununu in 2002. Yes, that was a bad year for Democrats, but she lost to him.
I would love to see some new blood. When I got involved, when Dean was running, the NHDP was a dinosaur. Old, tired and facing extinction it seemed. But the enthusiasm at the convention this year was amazing! We need to keep that going, not nip it in the bud.