This is an unabashed rant, I know, but I can’t help myself. I’ve been voting in New Hampshire elections since 1972, and I can’t remember a race for Senate or Congress more dispiriting than the current one between Kelly Ayotte and Maggie Hassan. Choosing between these two dreadful candidates is like trying to decide if you’d rather have a colectomy or a root canal.
Gov. Hassan is impossible to figure out. The papers keep calling her “popular,” but why or with whom is always left unsaid. Perhaps they’re talking about her family and friends.
She’s easily the most inarticulate public figure we’ve had in statewide office for a very long time, a fact that hasn’t particularly damaged her politically only because she has so little to say that’s worth hearing.
She got into office in the first place because the state’s Republican Party can’t buy viable candidates to save its life and ended up opposing her with an empty suit named Walt Havenstein (remember him?). Hassan then condemned her governorship to failure even before the election by taking the idiotic Pledge, thus declaring at the outset that she would make no effort to address the ongoing disaster that is New Hampshire’s famously retrograde tax structure.
Instead, she fantasized her budget by writing in game-saving revenue from a non-existent casino, then embarked on a doomed quest to get the Legislature to approve what it has repeatedly shot down.
When that august body failed once again to take her desperate bait (“It’s in the budget!”), she shrugged her shoulders and decided to run for Senate, previewing the elevation of her bad judgment to a national level with abhorrent comments about slamming the door in the faces of Syrian refugees.
Yes, that’s right, the ones Pope Francis took home with him. What’s not to like about Maggie? Everything!
Ayotte, on the other hand, is all too easy to figure. Taking full advantage of the 2010 wave of Tea Party revulsion for Republican regulars and a Democratic opponent only slightly more inspiring than the hapless Havenstein, she slipped into the Senate with wide-eyed surprise, and immediately accepted an unofficial appointment as political house pet to John McCain and Lindsey Graham, whose soporific pronouncements she parrots with robotic redundancy.
Ayotte appears to be immune to independent thinking in any form. It’s hard to believe she was produced by the same state that once sent Warren Rudman to Washington.
Whether she’s inveighing against the fiend-like malignancy of Planned Parenthood, signing schoolyard-bully letters to the government of Iran or upholding the puerile refusal of Senate Republicans to even consider the president’s nominee to the Supreme Court, Ayotte’s greatest talent seems to be her ability to maintain patently absurd positions with a straight face.
The great irony of her tenure is that, having been elected to provide something like a fresh conservative voice, she has dedicated herself to precisely the same tedious obsession – the total destruction of Barack Obama’s presidency – that is now on the verge not only of obliterating Republican chances in this year’s election but quite possibly the party itself.
Way to go, Kelly!
If complacency, small-mindedness and myopia are your preferred qualities in a U.S. senator, New Hampshire’s 2016 race is a golden opportunity no matter which way you go.
If you hold out a wistful shred of hope that wisdom, courage or statesmanship might find a place in that chair, better luck next time.
(Kevin Gardner lives in Hopkinton.)