By Steven Wishnia

MANCHESTER, NH—”The oil companies, insurance companies, predatory student-loan companies have had seven years of a President who stands up for them,” Hillary Clinton told a triumphant crowd here on the night of her victory in the New Hampshire primary. “It’s time we had a President who stands up for all of us.”

Those reading the roster of the senator’s corporate contributors might be skeptical of her populist rhetoric, but it resonated with New Hampshire voters, who gave her a narrow win over Sen. Barack Obama on Jan. 8. Democratic voters around the state almost universally identified their top four issues as ending the Iraq war, health care, the environment and global warming, and education, especially the high cost of college and the teach-to-the-test mandates of President Bush’s “No Child Left Behind” program. Clinton supporters often cited the economy as well.

“I listened to you, and in the process I found my own voice,” Clinton proclaimed.

The four leading Democratic contenders—Clinton, Obama, former Sen. John Edwards, and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, who finished a distant fourth in New Hampshire—all adopted fierce but often incomplete stances on the Iraq war and health care. All spoke about ending the war and bringing the troops home, but only Richardson pledged to do so within a year. Clinton, Obama, and Edwards all proposed universal health care, but through systems involving having the 47 million uninsured people buy insurance. (Obama’s proposal would not actually be universal; the other two would require everyone to buy either government or private insurance.)

That frustrates Rep. Dennis Kucinich, the most left-wing Democrat in the race, who finished fifth, garnering only 2 percent of the vote. The Cleveland congressman, running on a platform of immediate withdrawal from Iraq and a single-payer national nonprofit health-care system, realizes that he is not going to win the Presidential nomination—he is also seeking re-election to his House seat—but wants to call attention to those issues.

“Health care should never be a privilege based on ability to pay,” Kucinich told a small but loud group of supporters at a Manchester bar. “People did not vote for a change from a Republican version of the war in Iraq to a Democratic version of the war. It is not acceptable for Democrats to say ‘2013.’”

The problem for Kucinich is raising his support from fringe-candidate status to that of a minority big enough to have some influence. “Unless someone comes forward and makes a commitment, and it’s credible, who else will be there?” he responds. “I think this race is going to go all the way to the convention. The very unpredictability of it will open the way for a candidate like me.” He vowed to make the Michigan primary a referendum on NAFTA.

The Democrats are more solid on environmental issues. Obama calls it a “planetary crisis” and vows a “Manhattan Project for clean energy.” Edwards wants to spend $25 billion on creating “green infrastructure.” Clinton says she believes we will create 5 million “green-collar jobs” in the next ten years. Richardson says “we need an energy revolution,” converting half of current fossil-fuel consumption to solar, wind, and biofuel power by 2020, as well as expanding mass transit and raising fuel-economy standards to 50 miles per gallon.

Even some Republicans are acknowledging global warming. Arizona Sen. John McCain, who easily defeated Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney in the New Hampshire GOP race, opened a speech in Concord the day before the primary by vowing to “clean up the planet” and “make global warming a priority.”

But at this point, the Republicans appear fractured, with no one like Reagan or Bush who’s personable and belligerent enough to unite plutocrats, war hawks, and working-class religious conservatives. Romney is probably the closest to a pure right-winger, but his opportunism is fairly blatant, and he’s often cluelessly upper-class. Mike Huckabee’s base is in the religious right, but the plutocrats dismiss him as a hick. The number bar on Rudy Giuliani’s speechwriter’s keyboard is missing all the digits except 9 and 1. And the more doctrinaire doubt McCain for being against torture and saying that illegal immigrants are human beings.

In the past 20 years, the Democrats have largely abdicated their traditional role as the country’s labor party, but that appears to be changing at least rhetorically. Though Edwards is the most pugnacious, fulminating about “fighting against entrenched corporate interests” almost as much as Obama says “change,” the others have used similar phraseology. (If the Democrats are not credible on working-class issues, they will likely leave the Republicans an opening to exploit anti-immigrant sentiment in the guise of protecting American jobs.)

In New Hampshire, Clinton won by carrying the state’s southeast. She bested Obama by a 3-2 margin in Manchester and Nashua, its two largest cities, old factory towns now experiencing yuppie and Boston edge-city development. (In Manchester, the old mills by the Merrimack River are now filled with finance, real-estate, and high-tech offices.) She more narrowly took Claremont, a small Connecticut River city hit hard by factory closings. Obama carried the state capital of Concord; Portsmouth, a coastal town popular with gays and lesbians; and won overwhelmingly in the university areas of Durham, Keene, and Hanover-Lebanon-Lyme.

Clinton supporters frequently cite her brains and experience, and many remember the Bill Clinton administration as the only time since 1980 when the country didn’t have a far-right President. “The ’90s were good to me,” says Ralph Gramazio, a 44-year-old waiter from Boston who came up to volunteer on primary day. “I was able to buy a house. There was no war. It was the first time in my adult life when I felt there was a leader in the White House who represented me.” Although it is not automatic that female voters will support her because she is a woman, that is a significant undercurrent. “All the women were giving me the thumbs-up sign,” says a Clinton volunteer who was doing “visibility,” holding up placards outside the polls.

Obama’s strongest appeal is that his claim that he can bring a politics of hope instead of acrimony. That appeal is strongest among the idealistic young, but it also reaches their elders. “I never thought I’d say this, but this guy was better than JFK,” white-haired Tommy Keane declares after Obama’s speech in Lebanon. Lyme novelist Walter Wetherell, 57, perhaps sums it up best: “This talk of hope is a platitude, but people are desperate to hear it.”

Though Obama is now emphasizing that he is not a magical utopian, perhaps the biggest difference between him and Edwards is their view of the venerable Frederick Douglass dictum: “Power concedes nothing without a struggle.” “He’s really committed to fighting for the working class. He seems to be speaking from the heart, for the American people instead of corporations,” says Edwards backer Tim Josephson, a 29-year-old restaurant manager from Hanover.

What voters want, however—and what they believe the candidates are promising—is often more than what the candidates actually plan to deliver. “I just got kicked off my parents’ health plan. Hopefully, I’ll get a job with health insurance,” says Chris Sloan of Washington, DC, a recent college graduate who’s supporting Clinton because of her health-care proposals. But you’d still have to pay for insurance under her plan, he is told. “It’s better than nothing,” he replies.

Edwards supporters offer similar rationales. “If there’s a way for people to afford it, at least there’s a minimum,” says Jose Vargas, 50, an environmental consultant from West Lebanon. “A lot of Americans are afraid of socialized medicine.” Juanita Paynter, a 47-year-old office worker from Lebanon, says though the Edwards plan isn’t exactly the same as the Canadian system, “it’s a good one. I think he’s making promises he’ll keep.”

Edwards defends his plan by saying it’s politically achievable and could evolve into a single-payer system if enough people choose public coverage over private plans. “Why not go for single-payer? If he really wants to challenge the big insurance companies, he should come out and say that,” responds Eric Sawyer, 53, a carpenter from upstate New York staying with his in-laws in Nashua. “Don’t say that it’s unachievable, educate the people and lead.”

None of the several dozen Democrats I spoke to supported the Iraq war, but they are divided on the pace of ending it. Clinton backers often harshly criticize the war, but cut the candidate slack on her proposal for gradual withdrawal. “We shouldn’t have gone into Iraq. It was absolutely dumb,” says Don McGee, a Vermont teacher doing “visibility” on a Sunday afternoon in Claremont, but he believes it will take more than a year for the Iraqis to take over.

“We’ve messed up their country,” says Abby Krim, 46, a marketing representative from Concord. “We can’t just leave it alone.” And, she adds, “those two in the White House belong in jail.”

“All the candidates vaguely want to get out,” says undecided voter Malcolm Forbes, a retired ex-Marine from Merrimack. He says the United States should be fighting against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan—and that the Iraq war would end if Americans had to sacrifice to pay for it.

The American electoral process became much more democratic in the 1960s and early ’70s, with black people winning the right to vote in the South, the decline of the old party machines, and the increase in the number of states which selected convention delegates through primaries. Among the Democrats, the grass-roots antiwar movement unseated Lyndon Johnson in 1968 and nominated George McGovern in 1972. Among the Republicans, the far-right grass roots, beginning with the Goldwater campaign of 1964, allied with Southern and Western new money to wrest control of the party from the more centrist Wall Street establishment.

Yet two trends worked quickly to undermine that. One is that beginning with John F. Kennedy’s victory over Richard Nixon in 1960, a candidate’s television persona became crucial. By 1980, a system had solidified in which political branding—finding out what attributes people wanted to see, and hoping that the candidate could strike such poses without looking too insincere—became the way to achieve dominant market positioning.

The other is that TV commercials became the most effective way to reach a broad audience, and in order to purchase that air time, candidates had to solicit funds from people rich enough to have that kind of money. Like other pro-plutocrat trends in American life, that has exploded exponentially in the past decade. The 2004 race was the first billion-dollar presidential campaign, and both Bush and Kerry ignored most of the country to focus their campaigns on the handful of states considered competitive.

New Hampshire is not the most demographically representative state in the nation. It is around 95 percent white and has no cities of more than 125,000 people. But the beauty of it is that it’s small enough for voters to hear candidates speak and often meet them to ask specific questions. That is far more democratic than a process where candidates’ “seriousness” is determined by their ability to finance attack ads.