"My Peak Moment" by Gary Hart

My Peak Moment

By Gary Hart

Published in the Boston Globe December 28, 2007

Looking back well over two decades ago, it is impossible to isolate a defining moment in a dark-horse, long-shot, improbable presidential campaign in the nation's first primary. There were so many months of travel, so many hands to shake, so many questions to answer in so many living rooms and restaurants across New Hampshire that the temptation is to treat it all as a long-ago blur of memory.

Yet events and circumstances do still stand out these many years later: the good humor and hospitality of Connie and Maria at the Merrimack Restaurant in Manchester; campaigning at town dumps on Saturday mornings; the pleasure of saying thanks to people at plant gates at 5 a.m. the day after the primary; and, of course, the axe-throw.

Visiting the annual woodsmen conclave in Berlin about a week before the primary provided a chance to show that I wasn't just another stuffed-shirt politician in a suit and tie. My key organizers, Jeannie Shaheen and Sue Casey, understood me well enough to know that I might do something a little out of the ordinary if, in checkered shirt, Levis, and boots, I was given half a chance. And, unlike the many months before, here we were with a sizable, though not yet overwhelming, press corps.

The log-sawing and other exhibits looked like too much work for a weary politician, even a Western outdoorsy one; but here was a new challenge - a full-length, double-bit axe and a 3-foot target 20 yards away. Let's give it a try. Honesty requires the full report to state that the first try bounced off the target. Little harm done. The cameras, thank goodness, weren't ready. But when it was clear that a second try was to be undertaken, up came the cameras and the note pads and off went the axe.

Consider, if you will, the eternity that transpired for a would-be president, while the axe left his hand and, in elaborate slow motion, made one flip, then revolved yet another 360 degrees, and, in absolute silence, the sharpened bit met the very center of the target . . . and stuck there. Life, at least for a candidate, held no greater drama. The arms of victory were thrust in the air. The small crowd of onlookers cheered. Reporters looked at each other in stupefied wonder. What had they just seen?

For the triumphant, axe-throwing candidate, what they had just seen was an act of destiny, and the election of the next president of the United States.

Euphoria, of course, lasts but a moment and the act of destiny reached only to the marathon of primaries to follow New Hampshire and not to the White House. Political life by this time should have held no surprises for the axe-throwing victor in the New Hampshire primary, but he would read with wonder accounts of the 1984 Democratic nomination process for years thereafter that essentially held that he "peaked in New Hampshire." That would be true as far as axes were concerned. No axes or targets were provided him thereafter.

But New Hampshire certified him as a serious contender for his party's nomination and opened the door to 25 or more primary and caucus victories, including seven of nine "super Tuesday" states and virtually all the West, including California, and 1,200 delegates to the national convention.

It is possible to be victorious in New Hampshire and have it lead to little else. In my case it led to a great deal else, and I was happy for being able to ratify the judgment of New Hampshire voters that I deserved national consideration.

Extravagant campaign costs, calendar front-loading, and special-interest endorsements have all but closed the window on so-called "dark horse" candidates, those from smaller states with little national notoriety and little money but who may, just rarely, represent the new voice and ideas, the generational transition, required of a great nation in a time of great change. Only a New Hampshire, a human-scale state composed of those with open doors and open minds, and the itch to buck the conventional political wisdom, can provide that slim but critical chance. We cannot afford to lose it.