Monroe Anderson

Hillary’s bogus experience and Barack’s undocumented defeat

    In New Hampshire, the dueling themes were experience versus change. Hillary Clinton was the one with experience. Barack Obama represented change. By the time election day arrived, Hillary was the experienced one who really represented change. Barack’s change represented false hope because he was too inexperienced to do anything but wish upon a star.
    And so it went. And while it was going in that direction, I got to thinking about Mrs. Clinton’s experiences and how they might apply to rescuing the nation’s economy and beating down the terrorists. Before long, I came up with a personal interpretation.
    Hillary’s principal presidential experience was that she was married to Bill. For eight years she got to watch him run the nation. No doubt she was his confidant. She also got to go to most of the leader-of-the-free-world functions that he had to attend.
    I am married to the artist, Joyce Owens.  (You are looking at one of her paintings, Eve's Power Trip. Click on her name to check out her website.) For the past 30 years, I’ve watched her work on hundreds of paintings and three-dimensional constructions. I’ve helped her name some of her paintings and price some of the others. I’ve gone to more of her exhibition openings than I can count; I listened to more of her lectures and speeches on art than I can recall.
    But, unlike Hillary's premise on politics, I know my experiences in the art world don’t quite make me a visual artist. I sometimes doodle and I did a water color once and I must admit, it was good enough to exhibit side by side with some of the other art at the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art–of course less sophisticated art patrons may have thought it a bit amateurish.
    And I doubt if I’ll receive any invitation for a one-man show at the Chicago’s venerable South Side Community Art Center. I won’t be on the cover of Art News Magazine. And I could easily join the ranks of starving artists.
    Maybe I am just not as audacious as Hillary. So I watch her as she boldly seeks Bill’s old job, pretending that sitting on the sidelines is as validating as suiting up on the hardwood court, while I keep an eye on what’s real . . . which takes me to Barack’s loss in New Hampshire.
    As Tony Fitzpatrick and Jeb have already pointed out in the comments section of my blog, Hillary and Barack each received nine delegates out of the New Hampshire primary.
    By my reckoning, that would be a tie.
    And when the two candidates got the hell out of the Granite State, moving onto what’s next, they took their total pledged delegate count with them. Barack had 16 from Iowa and nine from New Hampshire for a total of 25. Hillary had 15 from Iowa and nine from New Hampshire for a total of 24. John Edwards had 14 from Iowa and four from New Hampshire for a total of 18.
    To call Obama the race’s front-runner would not be an exaggeration. To point out that it’s too early and too close to call goes without saying.

Now we'll see if Barack got game

This is the last of my reporting from the Granite State where the people are polite, the bars close early and the speed traps and property taxes raise revenues instead of state income or sales taxes. I was reporting for the Afro American Newspapers which are published in Baltimore and Washington, D.C. My reports are on afro.com or you can read them here.

Wednesday, January 09, 2008

For many, New Hampshire still a win

By Monroe Anderson

AFRO Staff Writer

MANCHESTER, N.H.-- It was a miss, but a miss so close that to many it doesn’t seem to matter.

Yes, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama lost to his chief rival, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton by a hair, a mere two percentage points.

But with a win in nearly all-White Iowa and an impressive showing in even Whiter New Hampshire, some see his loss as more of a win than anything else.

Consequently, when the January 26 Democratic primary in South Carolina rolls around, Beverly Rock will be in there doing just what she did in this week New Hampshire primary: supporting Barack Obama's bid to become the Democratic nominee for president.

“We are ready to take this country in a fundamentally different direction," he told his supporters.

"I'm already headed south to volunteer," said Rock, a 60-year-old grandmother from Dorchester, Mass., as she literally danced to Stevie Wonder's "Signed, Sealed, Delivered," while leaving the Obama rally late Tuesday night in the gymnasium at Nashua South High School in Nashua, New Hampshire.

"I'm all fired up." Rock had just finished listening to speech congratulating challenger Hillary Clinton on her 39 to 37 percent victory in the nation's first primary election. In his speech after the results came in late Tuesday night, the freshman Illinois senator temporarily altered his rally cry from “CHANGE” to "Yes We Can!"

“We are ready to take this country in a fundamentally different direction," he told his supports.

Obama congratulated Clinton on her victory then went on to tell his supporters, "We know the battle ahead will be long."

Following their candidates speech, as they flowed out of the packed gym, one face after the next wore a look of disappointment--except for Rock's.

"I didn't consider it a concession," she said of Obama's speech. "I considered it an inspiration."

As far as she was concerned, after winning in Iowa, Obama was just being the gentleman.

“He let the lady go first," she said. She thought the too-close-to-call race was more a character builder than anything to be disappointed by.

"I'm encouraged to go back and say "wow,' second.," she said.

Rock may have a point.

Two months ago, Barack Obama's strong showing in New Hampshire would have been considered nothing less than a major win.

But then, last week's historic victory in Iowa got in the way of this week’s results in the Granite State—dimming to some degree Obama’s prospects of becoming the nation’s first Black Democratic Party presidential nominee.

Iowa left some skeptical African Americans "feeling more confident that Obama has a good chance of getting the white support he may need," said Rep. Mel Watt (D-North Carolina), who pointed out that everyone loves a winner.

"Black voters are just as practical," he said, "as white voters are."

Now, all bets may be off. The loss to Hillary Clinton has slowed to some degree momentum for Obama. It revived the one question that has shackled Obama since he first announced his run for the White House nearly a year ago to unprecedented performance a week ago in Iowa: Can he really come out on top?

A hands-down Obama victory, as all the opinion polls indicated up to the minute the polling booths opened, would have put an end to that question. And would have made it all but certain that Obama would have racked up a third win once the January 26 South Carolina Democratic primary was over.

But that was not to happen in a state that, up until the Iowa victory, was considered Clinton territory. Still, six weeks ago, Obama was a 20-point underdog in the state.

But neither a win in Iowa or a loss in New Hampshire alters a fundamental truth, Watt said. "He's going to have to win every vote and watch everything he says," he said.

Valerie Jarrett, chairman of the Chicago board of the Chicago Stock Exchange and a senior Obama adviser, said that last week's Iowa victory has already changed the attitudes of black voters in the South.

Jarrett said she had just returned from South Carolina where she had been in rural counties and big cities, and the sentiment was "look what happened in Iowa. If folks can support him in Iowa, he can win."

Right before Hillary popped Obama's bubble

This was posted on afro.com around noon Tuesday, eight hours before the polls closed in New Hampshire. Ten and a half hours later, it was close but no cigar for Obama. I'll post my wrap-up news story here a little later today. To use an altered sports cliche, wait 'til South Carolina.

btw, I shot the two pictures with a Nikon Coolpix loaned to me by the newspaper.

Obama already a winner in parts of New Hampshire

By Monroe Anderson

AFRO Staff Writer

NASHUA, N.H. -- Barack Obama was the undisputed winner in the earliest results of the New Hampshire Democratic primary. In a long-running tradition, two remote mountain tiny towns, Dixville Notch and Hart's Location, in the Granite state's northern region, cast their ballots at midnight.

The polls are immediately closed then to tally the results.

Obama received seven votes in Dixville Notch, which has 74 residents. Meanwhile, New York Sen. Hillary Clinton didn’t receive any votes. Former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards got two votes and New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson one, according to the Associated Press.

In Hart's Location, population 42, Obama received nine votes, Clinton three and Edwards one.

New Hampshire law allows towns of fewer than 100 residents to open polls after midnight so that their residents can cast the first votes of the first primary in the nation. The ballots can only be counted after all registered voters have participated.

Polls close between 6 and 8 p.m. for all the rest of the towns and cities in the state.

The vote in the tiny towns could be a prelude to the final results, according to exit polls. One exit poll places the Illinois senator four points ahead of his closest rival, Clinton, and another gives him a seven point advantage.

Voter turnout was extremely heavy, with long lines at some voting sites. There are reports that so many showed up at polling places in Portsmouth, voting officials ran out of ballots.

Obama held an early rally for the candidate at Dartmouth College in Hanover. He made a couple of stops at coffee shops and campaign offices to thank supporters and check on voter turnout.

Obama will close out the day at a primary night rally at Nashua South High School. He is expected to talk at about 11 p.m., depending on the polls

SS: Protecting Obama from the media?

I've been criss crossing New Hampshire, jumping on and off the bus with no time to blog. Here's a blog for the Afro American that's now a blog for here.

Sunday, January 06, 2008

On the campaign trail with Monroe Anderson

Monroe Anderson, a veteran Chicago reporter who has been a reporter, columnist and editor for such publications as the Chicago Tribune, Chicago Sun-Times and Savoy Magazine, is covering Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign in New Hampshire for the Afro-American newspapers as part of the newspaper’s 2008 presidential campaign coverage. He filed this report from New Hampshire of what a day is like “on the bus” with the Obama campaign. 

NASHAU, N.H. -- No sooner than we were off the bus and out of the cold, we were ushered into an empty gymnasium at Nashua North High School, home of the Titans, where we had to line up our bags, cameras and recording equipment against a wall. As the other journalists and I from the Obama campaign’s two traveling press buses watched, a bomb sniffing dog gave our possessions the twice over.

To no one’s surprise, no explosives were found.

In the meantime, while we were once again (yes, all our possessions got the doggy sniff-over yesterday before a big rally) on the suspect-end of a terrorist check, 2,500 or so politically-active residents of the Granite State marched into the gymnasium unchecked and apparently without suspicion.

For the most part, the crowd was mad about Obama. When our two buses pulled up to the high school, the good citizens of New Hampshire were already waiting in two long lines with two-feet of continuous mounds of shoveled snow on each side.

Fortunately, the temperature had risen from the single digit the day before to the low 20s. They didn’t seem to notice the cold.

Inside the gymnasium, the crowd sat on risers just as they would to watch the Titans play a little basketball.

It was standing room only with hundreds of others waiting outside to get in. The empty gym, the one where the doggie detectors had checked our bags, was called into duty to shelter the overflow.

Many held the Obama campaign’s “CHANGE” placards, ready to flash them on cue or whenever the spirit hit.

When the winner of the Iowa primary appeared, they applauded and cheered and waved their signs. Obama acknowledged those who didn’t get there early enough to sit in the rally gym and promised to come back to the doggie gym to shake hands with them after his speech was over.

Some members of the media corps recorded the action. Others of us sat with our laptops researching or writing. We’d heard the stump speech before, so much so that Andy Shaw, a TV reporter with the ABC station in Chicago who had flown in for the debates, began quoting the speech as Obama spoke it.

That’s how it goes on the campaign trail for the guys on the bus. Different audience, same old speech.

Obama spoke for a little more than 30 minutes. Since the speech was new to the audience, Obama had them laughing at the same jokes and head nodding and in the same spots.

When he was done, most of the crowd filed out. A few hung around the cordoned-off press area, looking for familiar media faces or hoping to get interviewed.

I talked to Ron Stocker, who had come up from Westchester County in New York to volunteer for the Obama campaign. He brought his car and is planning to drive voters to the polls. He hopes President Obama will appoint John Edwards as attorney general.

Like all but two handfuls of those in the gym, Stocker is white, which is to be expected in a state that is 99 percent white. So is Pat Wootan who came from upstate New York to volunteer for Obama. Wootan, sporting a shirt with Obama’s likeness on the front, said she loves Obama, because she met him months ago and he promised he’d make sure her grandson got home safely from the war.

After they left, the press waited in the gym. All the supporters leaving at once had created a traffic jam. We sat with our laptops and Blackberrys or talked politics with each other for an hour or so.

It was only after we were on the bus that we learned that Obama had been in the pooch gym shooting some hoops with members of his campaign staff while we were in the other gym shooting the quips.

"I thought he was sick," I said.

"He just has a sore throat,” a campaign staffer replied. “It’s getting better."

"He was playing H-O-R-S-E."

"Did he spell it hoarse," one of the reporters asked.

We’re still waiting for someone to get back to us.

-- Monroe Anderson

Obama's changing Hillary's odds

I'm sitting in another rally for Obama. This one is in the gymnasium of the Nashua North Titans. When our press bus arrived there were two long, winding lines of folks standing in the cold waiting to get in. They're in now and one of the other journalists guestimated that there are more than 2,500 in the overflow crowd. Hundreds are still waiting outside so they're going to put the overflow crowd in a second gym. I can count the blacks in the house on both hands. No surpise. New Hampshire's black population is a hefty one percent.

From my bird's eye view, it looks like Hillary is in trouble. (A Rasmussen poll released later in the day had Obama with 37 percent of the New Hampshire vote, Hillary with 27 percent.) If Obama wins this white state after winning Iowa, South Carolina should fall easily in his win column. We'll see.

Here's the news story I wrote for the Afro American News yesterday. Sooner or later I get back to being the pundit.

Friday, January 04, 2008

A victorious Obama sweeps into New Hampshire 

By Monroe Anderson

AFRO Staff Writer

PORTSMOUTH, N.H – Just hours after his unprecedented victory in the Iowa caucuses, a hoarse Barack Obama Friday addressed an enthusiastic rally of nearly 500 volunteers here who he hopes will help him make history again in New Hampshire.

"How's it going New Hampshire?" the freshman Illinois senator asked, his voice scratchy and strained. "My throat is still a little sore, but my spirits are high."

Sore throat or not, it was obvious that Obama's quest to become the nation's first African American president was alive and well as he arrived in New Hampshire. In an Iowa contest that virtually all polls and pundits said up until the final hours was too close to call, Obama blew away his rivals with 38 percent of the votes. Challengers former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and New York Sen. Hillary Clinton received 29 percent each.

A record number of young voters showed up at the Iowa caucuses in response to Obama's battle cry for change. In one caucus, more than 200 voters showed up as compared with only 85 four years earlier.

Obama landed in New Hampshire to campaign for the New England state's January 8 primary election, continuing his call for change as the core for his campaign, with hope as its driving force.

"In four days, New Hampshire, you can have a chance to change America," he told the crowd.

Brushing aside Clinton’s campaign message that stresses the importance of experience, Obama said he was running for president because of what the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. called "the fierce urgency of now."

His campaign message Friday was that change in America is needed now and that he is the one to make it happen.

"There are those who say Obama should not be running for president, because he hasn't been in Washington long enough," he said to the excited throng. "They say I need to be seasoned and stewed, so they can boil all the hope out of me."

As Obama spoke, the enthusiastic crowd applauded and waved signs with “Change” in bold print.

Kwame Boadi, a John Hopkins University graduate student, was in that crowd.

"I'm just up to help through the primaries," Boadi, 25, said.

Boadi said he made the trip to Portsmouth from D.C. to volunteer for the Obama campaign because he relates to the candidate with a Kenyan father and Kansas mother on a personal level. Although he was raised in D.C., Boadi was born in Uganda and is studying international affairs. Boadi said what excites him about Obama that he represents change.

Boadi said that while he holds no ill will towards Hillary, "she's more of a status quo candidate. That's not what I want."

Volunteering in Manchester

Here's my first story for the Afro-American News after I flew into Manchester and attended an organizing function at the home of Terry Wiggins. Mary Strassel stood out in the crowd. As it turns out, she had an interesting story to tell as to why she became a volunteer for the Obama campaign.

Thursday January 03, 2008

In nearly all-white state: Black New Hampshire volunteer rallies for Obama

Black voluteer rallies her family, friends and others to Obama campaign

By Monroe Anderson
AFRO Staff Writer

Manchester, N.H. --Until last November, Mary Strassel couldn’t decide whose camp she’d be in for the fast-approaching Democratic party presidential nomination. She liked front-runner Hillary Clinton a lot. She also liked Clinton’s main contender, Barack Obama.

“I think I was flip-flopping,” Strassel said. “I actually went back and forth between Hillary and Obama.”

Back and forth yes, but she said she was more back with Clinton than forth with Obama. For Strassel, a transplanted Black Chicagoan, gender was sort of trumping race as a factor in her decision. The possibility of the first woman president had its appeal. “Obama’s being Black wasn’t my deciding factor, she said.

Then one night, the equivocating ended.

“The defining moment was when I watched him speak,” said Strassel, a mechanical engineer, who admits to not having followed the campaign very closely until then. “I decided not only am I going to vote for him, I’m going to work for him.’”

And volunteer work for Obama is just what the 41-year-old manufacturing engineer has done.

While the downside is marching through the New England cold to knock on scores of doors, there have been benefits. Strassel, along with 8,500 others in the area, attended the Obama rally with Oprah. She said she also got to meet Michelle Obama, the candidate’s wife.

With the Iowa caucuses now over, the nation’s attention turns to Strassel and others in New Hampshire to see how the candidates will do in this New England state.  And with that in mind, the Obama campaign is ramping up here. 

The night before the Iowa caucuses, Strassel, with her daughter, Marinne, joined 20 or so other Manchester volunteers at the home of Terry and Caroline Wiggins, to map out how they’d make phone calls to potential voters in the 10th and 11th wards for next Tuesday’s election here.

The volunteers are among nearly 1000 that the Obama campaign claims it has working on its behalf in New Hampshire. One said he had come from Miami to volunteer. He said he’d tried to go to Iowa to work for the primary there but that the Obama campaign had so many volunteers that they were turning people away. So, he, like Strassell, was braving the bitter cold New Hampshire winter to get out the vote.

Strassel said she’s been calling and canvassing for weeks now, attempting to flip those New Hampshire voters who as, as she once was, remain undecided.

The cold calls Strassel has made for the Obama campaign themselves have been a political education.

One response was a simple, “Republican all the way.” On another occasion, she overheard someone in the background advising the phone answerer to “hang up the phone.” More than once she got this quick earful, “Don’t call here anymore.”

But, more often than not, she said she’s encountered voters who have not quite decided who they’re voting for.

During those calls, she often has had to listen to New Hampshire residents voicing their political frustrations before she can pitch her candidate. She says the door-to-door canvassing has been met with more cordiality.

“They’re always polite,” she said.

Her daughter nodded in agreement. With a little prodding and encouragement from her mother, Marinne, 15, has also become an Obama campaign volunteer. And, like her mother, Obama’s race, was not a factor in her joining his camp.

“I didn’t know Obama was Black until someone told me,” said Marinne, who before joining the campaign had not been paying much attention to presidential politics.

Marinne was not the only one among Mary Strassel’s circle of family and friends who was not paying attention. Since becoming a volunteer, Strassel said she’s convinced “all my friends and all my people in my family” to vote for Obama.

“I’ve been converting them one by one,” she said, estimating that they alone now account for 40 or 50 of the previously undecided who will vote for her candidate Tuesday.

For most of her family and friends, as with her and her daughter, Obama’s race does not seem to be much a factor, Strassel said.

In a state where only one out of every 100 residents is black, that race doesn’t seem to matter does not come as a big surprise.

That half applies to Marinne Strassel. She said she related to the senator from Illinois because he, like her, was bi-racial. But, more importantly, she believes he’s the best candidate for the job.

“He’s going to be in my future,” she said, “and I want to have a better future.” 

But host Wiggins takes a more historical read of what’s happening now. He met presidential hopeful New York Sen. Hillary Clinton back when her husband Bill was running for president.

Wiggins, 53, the financial officer for the Dracut Public Schools, said that while he has great respect for Clinton,  “she’s sort of another traditional candidate.”

On the other hand, “Sen. Obama not only is more inspiring, he’s lived his life more on principles,” he said.  “This is the first time since JFK that we’re voting for a candidate, not against one.”

Busing in New Hampshire

I'm in New Hampshire covering the Obama campaign. I'll be on the press bus beginning Friday until Tuesday's primary election. I'll be at his early morning rally in Portsmouth, reporting what he has to say after his historic victory today in Iowa.

I'm reporting for the Afro American Newspaper. Tomorrow I'll post the first story I wrote on the New Hampshire campaign. More will follow. I'll also continue my ebonyjet.com column. And, I'm hoping to share some behind-the-scenes personal experiences with you--like my being speed-trapped in Manchester.