Printed: 11/4/2022 3:45:28 PM
Modified: 11/4/2022 3:45:10 PM
New Hampshire has lengthy laid its declare to holding the nation’s first presidential major on the reassurance that its residents are well-informed, independent-minded and engaged. Voters have a possibility to burnish that status Tuesday by reelecting Maggie Hassan to the U.S. Senate. In her first time period, Hassan has compiled an enviable document of bipartisan accomplishment whereas managing to be each pragmatic and principled. In brief, she is in lots of respects the embodiment of what has been referred to as “the New Hampshire approach.”
Her Republican opponent is Donald Bolduc, a retired brigadier common with no very apparent {qualifications} to carry excessive civilian workplace. Extra troubling but is that Bolduc is a free cannon who doesn’t merely insult the intelligence of the citizens; he slaps it within the face with a collection of preposterous claims. Extra on that later.
In distinction, Hassan shows a formidable grasp of public coverage points and has demonstrated an uncommon capability to search out frequent floor even in a extremely polarized Senate. All 48 payments she launched final yr attracted a Republican co-sponsor, serving to her to earn the nonpartisan Lugar Middle’s rating because the nation’s most bipartisan senator, with the very best rating ever attained by a Democratic senator.
One instance is the “no shock medical payments” laws she crafted with Sen. Invoice Cassidy, R-Louisiana, which shields sufferers from payments for out-of-network prices they weren’t conscious they have been incurring. One other is the CHIPS and Science Act launched with Sen. John Thune, R-South Dakota, which goals to extend semiconductor analysis and manufacturing in america.
The Bolduc camp has portrayed Hassan as a dependable vote for “the failed insurance policies” of President Biden. We suppose that these “failures” embody newly enacted laws that may drive down prescription drug prices by permitting Medicare to barter with pharmaceutical firms; rebuild America’s crumbling infrastructure; make unprecedented investments to fight local weather change; promote gun security; develop veterans’ well being advantages; and supply well timed intelligence and weapons to Ukraine to assist repel the Russian invasion. (Lots of these measures, by the best way, handed with Republican assist.)
Bolduc’s obvious calculation is that he can idiot sufficient folks lengthy sufficient to get elected. After proclaiming loud and lengthy for a lot of months that the 2020 election was stolen from his hero, Donald Trump, Bolduc, a few days after successful the Republican major, claimed to have had a road-to-Damascus conversion.
At a debate in August, he informed the viewers, “So I signed a letter with 120 different generals and admirals saying that Trump received the election and, dammit, I stand by my horse. I’m not switching horses, child. That is it.”
It’s maybe value noting right here that then-Main Bolduc led one of many first American particular forces contingents into Afghanistan whereas driving on horseback, and so presumably has first-hand data of the perils of switching horses. Nonetheless, having secured the Republican nomination on the premise of Trump’s huge lie, Bolduc informed Fox News shortly after the first that he had now concluded that — “and I wish to be definitive on this — the election was not stolen.” Effectively, perhaps not too definitively. In keeping with The New Yorker journal, he later informed a conservative podcast that “the narrative that the election was stolen, it doesn’t fly up right here in New Hampshire, for no matter cause.”
That model of cynicism can also be evident in Bolduc’s disingenuous declare that he wouldn’t vote for a nationwide abortion ban regardless of having insisted throughout the major that he would “all the time default for a system that protects lives from starting to finish.” If you happen to consider Bolduc’s assurances on abortion, Brett Kavanaugh has a bridge he want to promote you. Bolduc additionally has a message for girls outraged by the U.S. Supreme Court docket’s extinction of a constitutional proper to abortion: “Recover from it.” Hassan, then again, has made clear that her precedence is to dam a nationwide ban, and that’s one more compelling cause to ship her again to Washington.
Now we have come to think about this yr’s midterm elections as a referendum on turning again the clock, and we don’t imply the top of Daylight Saving Time. This thought was crystallized by a comment Bolduc lately made in Claremont. As our colleague John Lippman reported, he defined the origin of the nation’s troubles this fashion: “What has occurred over the previous 40 to 50 years is that our flesh pressers have eliminated God from the general public sq..”
We doubt that God is so readily dislodged as all that, however the remark is revealing. The forces of response are overseas within the land within the type of white supremacy, Christian nationalism and resurgent anti-Semitism, repellent ideologies components of that are embraced by too many Republicans. They threaten to roll again a half century of progress that secured rights and created alternative for folks of shade, for girls, for gays and lesbians and different teams.
We don’t suppose that folks in New Hampshire wish to flip again the clock by even an hour or a day. Maggie Hassan will be counted on to maintain her eyes firmly on a future through which a affluent economic system and a thriving democracy welcome the contributions of all.
