Here's one on me

At least I’m not the first journalist to write a premature obituary, and at least mine is a political obituary rather than an actual obituary.

One of my colleagues (thanks a lot, Dorgan) unearthed a column I wrote in November 2002 right after Jeanne Shaheen lost the U.S. Senate race to John Sununu. As you’ll see – I’m reprinting it below – I was pretty sure this defeat was the end of Shaheen’s political career. I doubt she thought any differently at the time.

Now she’s back for another go. She announced this week that she is seeking the Democratic nomination to run against Sununu in 2008.

To me, what is most notable about this 2002 column is how different state and national politics looks just five years later. The emergence of John Lynch? Who knew? The Clinton revival? Really? The 2006 Democratic romp? No!

See what you think:

Sunday Monitor: Nov. 10, 2002

Poof. In one short night, Jeanne Shaheen went up in smoke. A quarter century of politics and public service ended in decisive defeat. Maybe Shaheen will be back, but it is hard to see in what capacity.

In 25 years of campaigning for Jimmy Carter, Gary Hart, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, she labored to move national Democratic politics to the middle. Given that record, her party’s 2004 presidential candidates will court her, but she’s been there, done that.

Likewise, unless the Republicans implode during the next year, there is no way Shaheen will repeat herself by running against Sen. Judd Gregg in 2004.

She’s probably finished as a politician at 55. If so, New Hampshire Democrats have lost the only candidate they had with the savvy and the instincts to win statewide victories.

Why John E. Sununu defeated her on Tuesday is a question with a complicated answer.

For starters, Sununu was a formidable candidate. He was a Republican in a Republican state. New Hampshire voters like dynasties, and he has a familiar name. He succeeded in running as a moderate, a tried and true formula for Republican right-wingers.

Shaheen didn’t know it – no one did – but she was also running against a Republican tidal wave. More than any poll showed, the public wanted to speak with one voice, to stand together in the face of what happened on Sept. 11. President George W. Bush appealed to that desire. Shaheen’s loss was Bush’s victory.

Also working against her was the familiarity with which the governor’s office burdens its holder. Governors are so ubiquitous in our small state that the public tires of them. Their actions make enemies, and their enemies are always biding their time.

In this most swaggeringly tax-averse state in the nation, any three-term governor inevitably has to support taxes of some kind. One tax Shaheen opposed was the income tax. Nevertheless, in a case of guilt by association, she suffered during this year’s campaign for sharing her party’s ticket with Mark Fernald, a zealous income taxer and an inept politician.

The last of Shaheen’s problems on Tuesday is apparent only in the clear light of hindsight. The off-the-shelf national campaign the Democrats ran proved to be a disaster. All around the country, Democratic candidates for House and Senate rolled over on the big issues – Iraq, the tax cuts, Bush’s education plan. They succeeded too well in making the campaign about Social Security and prescription drugs for Medicare recipients – important but, in these times, peripheral issues.

This was ironic in Shaheen’s case. She is one of the original New Democrats. She helped her party see that it had to move beyond the New Deal and the Great Society. Yet here she was in 2002 campaigning on issues that posed the government as the dispenser of federal largesse and the voters as recipients.

Like any postmortem, this analysis is slightly unfair to Shaheen. She ran a masterful campaign, suckering Sununu into mistakes and expertly mobilizing her supporters. Had the election been held five days earlier, she might have won.

Events beyond her control damaged her chances, beginning with the crass politicization of Sen. Paul Wellstone’s memorial service in Minnesota. Visits to New Hampshire from the First Family and Rudy Guiliani boosted Sununu last weekend, and Shaheen was much too smart to counter with Clinton or Gore. This was a final reminder of how alone she was on the campaign trail, forced to keep her distance from both the other candidates on the Democratic ticket and the tarred has-beens of the Clinton shipwreck.

But no matter how difficult Shaheen’s challenge was, there’s no doubt her defeat will shrink her legacy. People are asking why she wasn’t a better party builder, why she didn’t groom a successor as a gubernatorial nominee. Her party is in disarray, leaderless, powerless, without a message.

As governor, she took on important issues, but her gains were incremental and may soon prove to be reversible. Whether voters meant to or not, they empowered people who might roll back Shaheen’s initiatives on abortion rights, gay rights and conservation. Her modest kindergarten program could stall and burn out. Her resolve, however halting, to accept the state’s duties under the Supreme Court's Claremont rulings will give way to a determination to overturn them.

The one distinction no one can take away from Shaheen is that she was the first woman elected governor in New Hampshire. But six years later, Republican males hold every major political office in the state, and the man elected to replace Shaheen has a court record for discriminating against women.

Over the long haul, the Republican claim on the corner office is so firm that the occasional Democratic governor quickly becomes little more than a footnote in history. The last one before Shaheen, Hugh Gallen, is remembered chiefly for dying in office after his failure to take the no-tax pledge cost him re-election in 1982.

After six years of modest goals and modest successes, Shaheen will be best remembered for a single act in the spring of 1999. Forced by the Supreme Court to finance public schools, the Legislature had a majority for an income tax. Shaheen stopped it cold with a veto threat.

The reason that moment looms so large in memory is that once it was gone, it was gone. Tuesday’s election returns were only the latest measure of how reviled – in the abstract, and with Republican scorn heaped upon it – the income tax has become.

Shaheen always argued that to have signed the income tax would have broken her no-tax pledge to voters. She also said she believed an income tax would harm the state.

Even so, this decision was bigger than either Shaheen’s honor or her opinion. She had a chance to provide real gains in educational opportunity for the children of Pittsfield, Allenstown and Franklin, and she chose not to risk it.

What was also on the line at that moment was her political future. Bob Smith’s U.S. Senate seat would not be on the election block for three more years, but she already had it in her sights. The state’s first female governor wanted to be its first female senator. Signing the income tax might have killed that dream.

New Hampshire politics is a high-wire act for any Democrat. Ambition, experience and a serious, centered nature helped Shaheen keep her balance for a long time. But, sad to say, history doesn’t make much of a place for mere survivors.

It is not Shaheen’s deeds that will define her political legacy. Rather it is the ironic coupling of two things that didn’t happen. Because of her, New Hampshire didn’t get the income tax. But killing the income tax didn’t win her a seat in the U.S. Senate.