The Candidates Next Door
In New Hampshire, far from the spotlight, some obscure would-be presidents are calling for change and asking for votes. Do they have a chance? That's not the point.
The New Hampshire primary is and always has been about people with dreams. Yes, people like Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton, but also Daniel Gilbert and Henry Hewes - outsiders who typically lack armies of consultants and vaults of cash but who are convinced they can improve the country. They are among the more than 200 candidates who have registered their presidential campaigns with the Federal Election Commission. Of those, 43 will appear on the Republican or Democratic ballots of the nation's first primary next month, having paid the $1,000 it took to qualify. Most of them run lonely campaigns and struggle to get noticed at all. Call them long shots. Call them crazy, even. But you have to call them citizens who dare to make a difference.
HENRY HEWES
58, DEMOCRAT, NEW YORK
"Ideas are like wildfire in the prairie," says Hewes, who has plenty of them, left and right. A real estate developer and a lifelong Republican before dismay with the Iraq war and restraints on civil liberties led him to change parties, he calls for a $10 minimum wage, universal health insurance, withdrawal from Iraq, a national sales tax, the end of payroll and income taxes, and - a big priority for him - banning abortions. "If every prolife voter who is a registered Democrat came out and voted for me in the New Hampshire primary, we would win in a walk," he says.
ALBERT HOWARD
41, REPUBLICAN, MICHIGAN
In October, 1990, singing bass in the Army Band, Howard performed before Gerald Ford at a public celebration. The former president looked impressive in his tuxedo. Years later, thinking about being the honoree himself, Howard reflected, "Hey, maybe the Gerald Ford thing will happen." He leans libertarian (against globalization and the Federal Reserve). He wants to stir citizen action. "You have a spirit of stagnation in our nation, and that has to be broken," he said the day he filed in New Hampshire. "You have a generation of young people who do not feel relevant. They're not involved in the process."
DANIEL GILBERT
61, REPUBLICAN, NORTH CAROLINA
Of the things that need fixing in America, illegal immigration ranks at the top of Gilbert's list. He's tough about it: Put troops along the Mexican border, he says. The conservative businessman, whose firm makes electronic percussion instruments, rejects President Bush's proposed guest-worker reforms. "There are too many people trying to be compassionate" to immigrants, he says. Even President Reagan, whom Gilbert praises as a man of principle, went soft: He granted amnesty to 3 million undocumented immigrants. Gilbert says the Republican Party has drifted the wrong way on the issue. "They are pandering to the Hispanic vote." The party, he says, "needs a new face."
RUTH BRYANT WHITE
52, INDEPENDENT, NEVADA
Campaigning in New Hampshire last summer, Bryant White credited her candidacy to the Rev. Al Sharpton. When he came on TV in 2005 and blamed President Bush for Hurricane Katrina's carnage, she told her family, "That's it. I'm running!" Too much hatemongering in the land. Bobby Kennedy is her model - a uniter, not a divider. She's known both struggle and harmony: A onetime single mom raising three kids, she now presents her interracial marriage as an example to others. Because she's a registered Independent and therefore not actually on the ballot herself, she's watching how Republican Mike Huckabee makes out; she says they'd make good co-presidents.
JAMES MITCHELL JR.
64, REPUBLICAN, ILLINOIS
"Back to basics" is Mitchell's theme. Back to the Ten Commandments, strong military, family values, and parental responsibility. He says he's got experience for the top spot: For 15 years, he's run a municipal water plant near Lake Michigan, and he learned financial management and consensus-building while serving on the Highland Park Mosquito Abatement District board. Why enter politics now? After his wife died of cancer, he found himself "footloose and fancy free." He quotes the Irish orator Edmund Burke: "No one could make a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."
DAL LAMAGNA
61, DEMOCRAT, WASHINGTON STATE
At Harvard Business School nearly 40 years ago, LaMagna watched Vietnam War protesters through his apartment window. Today, he's protesting the war in Iraq. Using some of the $50 million he made from selling Tweezerman, a personal-grooming firm that he built from the ground up, LaMagna helped produce three anti-Iraq war documentaries, and he set out to personally tell 20,000 Granite Staters why the troops should be brought home now. He's struggled to reach voters at county fairs, Rotary clubs, churches, and schools. "You can't meet 20,000 people when you're standing in front of a Dunkin' Donuts or movie theater," he says.
Mark Ostow is a Cambridge-based freelance photographer. Jim Rousmaniere is editor and president of The Keene Sentinel in Keene, New Hampshire. Send comments to magazine@globe.com.
