Politics for breakfast, lunch, and dinner

The campaign trail is littered with food stops -- pancake breakfasts, chili feeds, coffee klatches, and diner drop-ins. In the months leading up to next week's primary, New Hampshire residents have been wooed by plenty of political talk and generous helpings of food. Food often adds a note of social grace, a way to make potential voters feel, fleetingly, like the candidate has invited them to dinner.

There's a long tradition of this. Years ago, church and civic fund-raisers invited candidates to meet-and-greets while offering them samples of homemade sausage and beans. Now the campaigns provide the food and the volunteers serve it. The fare may not be haute cuisine, but it's palatable. And sometimes it's the only time volunteers and even the candidates get to eat.

In Keene, the audience filed past volunteers spooning batter onto hot plates and then cooking pancakes and dishing them up -- two per paper plate. Plastic bottles of Aunt Jemima and commercial pats of butter were arranged on long tables. As the crowd waited impatiently for Clark to arrive, young volunteers shuttled to and from the kitchen with pots of coffee and blue bowls of batter.

Ducking into the back revealed the pancake secret: "IHOP," said Molly Tsongas, a Brown University student who was making pancakes for the volunteers. The batter came in 5-gallon orange tubs and the trick to making the cakes was to keep the heat at the right temperature, she said.

Tsongas, a daughter of the late Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas, had come up to New Hampshire for the weekend to help the effort. She maneuvered a couple of pancakes onto a plate while another volunteer, Lindsay Speer, a Gloucester High School junior, located some syrup. The pancakes tasted commercially made -- inoffensive yet pretty heavy in texture.

Sturdy, one might say, which is a good quality when the candidate has to flip them for the cameras. Clark arrived to cheers, accompanied by former senator and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern, who caused near pandemonium. Both donned aprons and assiduously turned a dozen or so puffy pancakes each. Neither one ate a bite.

The Clark campaign buys the batter from International House of Pancakes -- 15 gallons were used at this event, said spokesman Bennett -- and provides the juice and coffee. Local campaign workers round up the volunteers.

Chili seems to be the food of choice for Senator John F. Kerry's campaign. Firefighters and other volunteers usually prepare the chili, paid for by the campaign or donated. Kerry often joins in dishing out the chili and samples a bit of it himself. A local restaurant, Goodfellas Tavern & Grill, made 15 gallons of beef-based chili for a Kerry feed Thursday in Laconia.

With the primary drawing closer, candidates made a mad dash across the state, dropping by restaurants and diners, though they were often too busy to eat. On Thursday, former Vermont governor Howard Dean spoke to customers at Lou's Restaurant in Hanover. Yesterday, Kerry did the same at Mary Ann's restaurant in Derry, while Clark served customers in the same town from a drive-through window at Dunkin' Donuts.

On Wednesday, Senator John Edwards squeezed into Roland's, a 49-seat neighborhood place in Nashua; it was standing-room only with reporters, cameramen, and voters. There were also several diners who came in for lunch and got caught in the crush. Ben Jackson of Framingham had been visiting his grandmother and stopped by for chicken tenders and mashed potatoes. "Good," he said of the lunch fare, as he warily eyed the growing crowd.

Roland's owner Billy Zaharopoulos said campaign workers had asked several days before the event if it could be held at his restaurant. Usually 40 or so people eat lunch there, he said, but that day only a few managed to squeeze in to eat the fork-tender baked lamb special in a tomato sauce for $6.99 or try the eggplant parmesan for $6.25. Yvette Marquis of Merrimack, N.H., had just finished breakfast when the room filled. "I don't think we could get out if we tried," she said, as a television camera cord snaked over dirty dishes at a table across the aisle and waitresses patiently tried to push through to fill water glasses and deliver checks.

"Food makes political events more social," said Mary Ann Marsh, a Democratic strategist, "and that makes it easier for candidates to be more personal than political." In today's overscheduled society, campaign workers know pancakes or chili might attract people, and it's often more efficient to buy prepared food rather than rely on civic groups to make it.

Stephen Hess, senior fellow of the Brookings Institution and an authority on presidential history, said social events have long been used by politicians to meet potential voters, and the association grew over the years. Food is one of the few areas where there are still regional differences, Hess said, "which I think is wonderful when you think how much the country has homogenized."

Food events may be here to stay, but, as with most aspects of campaigning, they seem to be getting more competitive, said Marsh. "For example, the pancake flipping in Iowa became a sport -- who could flip the pancakes the highest."