January 27 - February 3, 2000
![[Features]](/standard/image/headers/features_header.gif)
MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE -- "This is my secret for visibility!" exclaims Kevin Keefe, field director of the Bill Bradley campaign, grabbing what look like old washrags off his desk and swinging them triumphantly aloft. "Battery-powered socks!" Countdown to New Hampshire
While the presidential front-runners canvassed Iowa over the weekend, the underdog campaigns focused on the Granite State
by Margaret Doris
Visibility is shorthand for going door to door, handing out campaign literature. It's standing at roadsides, holding BEEP-BEEP FOR BILL BRADLEY banners. It's yard signs, town-hall forums, phone calls. It's blisters, chilblains, dog bites.
Visibility is the tip of the organizational iceberg. And organization is what wins New Hampshire. Organization is why John McCain will win next Tuesday's primary. It's why if Bill Bradley doesn't (and he really ought to), no one will be able to blame Kevin Keefe. Only once since 1972 has a non-incumbent candidate won both the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Only once has a party nominee won the White House without first winning New Hampshire. Which is why in New Hampshire last weekend, neither the Bradley nor the McCain campaign was giving the Iowa caucuses any thought at all.
Visibility, however, was commanding some extra consideration. Visibility is damn hard when the thermometer reads one below zero. It requires battery-powered socks. It requires disposable hand warmers, which Keefe orders by the carton to hand out to the hundreds of new volunteers -- mostly young, mostly college students -- arriving weekly at the state headquarters, located in a cavernous former furniture warehouse here. It requires fire in the bellies of those volunteers, sustained by the thought that they can actually make a difference. Which, of course, they can.
Also, the media's postmortem of the Iowa caucuses
In his account of George McGovern's 1972 campaign, McGovern campaign manager and future presidential candidate Gary Hart stressed the importance of organization. "The characteristics of a good political organizer are universal: efficient, low-key, persistent, methodical, durable (mentally and physically), orderly to the point of compulsion," he said. And though maybe Hart's description isn't actually universal -- "low-key" is not exactly a talking point on Kevin Keefe's résumé -- the compulsive accumulation and considered application of data is still the hallmark of a successful campaign. The walls of Keefe's office are lined with maps: "All I do is color and put maps on all day," he says.
There are maps dividing the state into regions; Keefe can tell at a glance where his teams of field coordinators are and what volunteers they're responsible for. There's a canvas map, showing all the towns "where we've knocked on every door." ("The top 27 towns, we've fully canvassed twice," he says. "Keene's been fully canvassed three times.") There are "lit drop" maps, showing where campaign material has been distributed, and highway maps, which Keefe can use to puzzle out the quickest way to the farthest backwater burg. There's a huge map of the United States, where staffers post updates on the cheapest fares from any of the 48 contiguous states to Manchester or Boston. "That's another phenomenon that's changed campaigns -- cheap airfare," says Keefe, who did New Hampshire field organizing for Dick Gephardt in 1988 and for Bill Clinton in 1992. For only a couple hundred bucks -- less than the credit limit on most college students' Visa cards -- a volunteer can fly in for a week or a weekend from almost anywhere in the country.
But it is, of course, the Internet that's changed campaign organizing the most (see "Virtually Revealing," News and Features, January 21). Visitors to Bradley's Web site can volunteer with a simple push of a button. "In the past, if you don't have something for them to do, you'd lose them," Keefe says. With the Net, though, "they keep 'em warm, they send 'em e- mails. When we do need 'em, they're all on a database. We pop 'em up an e- mail -- 'Come to New Hampshire, we need you' -- and they come."
And keep coming. On January 2, 62 volunteers arrived. On January 5, 136 showed up. Every day, at least 100 new faces appear at headquarters. On any given day, Keefe estimates, the campaign is responsible for housing anywhere from 150 to 250 volunteers, most of them in private homes. Keefe himself has been bunking in a home in Londonderry, in what the owners call the Pig Room. More than 300 pig items smile benignly on Keefe as he sleeps. A colleague was sleeping in the adjacent Doll Room, but "he used to have nightmares -- he thought they were all staring at him." So he's moved back to Manchester and the Flop-House, a donated hostelry whose newsletter recently advised residents not to smoke, to have all visitors out by 11 p.m., and to "bring a bag of trash to work each day" in order to reduce the household burden.
On Saturday night, Keefe presides over more than 100 volunteers as they prepare lit drops and mailings and make phone calls. At one table, young student-council types stuff envelopes and cloak sexual tension in coy talk of superdelegates. A carload of high-school students from New York -- well suited for roles in Revenge of the Nerds V -- are gently admonished after writing "Sorry I missed you -- Chewbacca" on some of the pamphlets for a literature drop. In a back room, two vanloads of students from Pitt make phone calls to prospective voters. The phone lists are bad; there seem to be a disproportionate number of dead voters. "I'm sorry for your loss," one student says, pressing on gamely. "Is there anything you'd like to know about Bill Bradley?"
"I work in human resources," he explains later. "I'm used to cold calls."
"The best thing about kids in their first campaign is their energy," says Keefe. "They don't know what you can't do, so they invent things. They throw out ideas . . .
"Some of them," he admits, "are screwy."
On Sunday morning, Joan Rogers of Plaistow is stamping postcards in Senator John McCain's Merrimack Street campaign headquarters. "I'm 49," she says, "and this is the first campaign I've volunteered in." She's been working since last summer; for the past week she's been bringing along two friends, also first-timers. "An average person is never going to have a chance again," Rogers explains. Adds her friend Terrie Kahl: "Maybe politics could be improved for a change, or changed.""The enthusiasm of first-time volunteers is amazing," says a McCain staffer who asked not to be named. "They'll do anything. After 20 years [of volunteering], you go, 'What can I get out of?' "
McCain agrees. "We have people involved in our campaign who have never been involved before," he says. "Fifty thousand people have volunteered over the Internet" to work on the national campaign. Unlike the Bradley effort, however, McCain's state campaign is relying almost exclusively on New Hampshire volunteers, most of them middle-aged or older.
His campaign makes it easy to get involved. At each stop, there are sign-up sheets where attendees are asked to indicate their interests, from active volunteering to receiving mailings. No one leaves without being urged to take 20 pieces of literature to distribute to friends and neighbors. After a Sunday "town meeting" appearance in Salem, supporters are encouraged to help themselves to McCain yard signs and eight-inch metal spikes. "We went down to Home Depot and got a bunch of spikes," explains State Representative Janeen Dalrymple, noting that the sudden drop in temperatures has frozen the ground rock-hard. Yards signs don't do much good, after all, if they're left in the trunk of a car or pinned up in a basement rec room.
McCain and his "Straight-Talk Express" will be bus-storming the state, crisscrossing New Hampshire without stopping until primary day. Several times a day, McCain does his high-wire act: taking unscripted, unscreened questions from the audience while the television cameras whir. In Concord, a man wants to know what McCain is going to do about the fact that Clinton is a KGB operative. In Salem, a man complains that the military is forcing his son to take early retirement. Back in Concord a little girl, a stooge for her parents, wants to know what the candidate thinks of school vouchers. McCain doesn't take a single false step.
In a back room of his New Hampshire headquarters is a revealing set of numbers. Staffers are updating a four-category comparison of McCain and Bush. Trips to New Hampshire: McCain 28, Bush 9. Days spent in New Hampshire: McCain 62, Bush 9. Town-hall forums: McCain 94, Bush 1. Endorsements by state legislators: McCain 76, Bush 65. These figures, they are hoping, mean more than any Iowa caucus.
Kevin Keefe is psyched. One of those screwy kid ideas might just bear fruit. Why, a kid wanted to know, don't we do a literature drop at Dunkin' Donuts? Everybody goes to Dunkin' Donuts. Keefe figures there's a least one Dunkin' Donuts for every precinct in New Hampshire. So if he can do a lit drop at every Dunkin' Donuts -- say, "A Slam Dunkin' for Bill" on Thursday -- it's the perfect dry run for primary day. "If we can get people to stand in front of Dunkin' Donuts, we can get them to stand in front of polling places," he explains. "If you give 'em a smile, hand 'em a piece of literature, you steal a couple of votes from the other guy that way . . . you keep yours solid."Visibility. "It's all of these things together," Keefe says. "One person's going to get turned on by this piece of lit. One by a phone call. One by the visibility and enthusiasm. And you don't know which for which, so you just try and hit all the buttons."
Margaret Doris is a freelance writer living in Newton; she has written about presidential politics since 1984.
