"A pack of maple-syrup-swilling squirrel worshippers"

Wherein hey, I'm a morning person; also, I changed the title


A. Whitney Brown on New Hampshire voters.
The Big Picture
1991

Excerpt from chapter 6: "How Maple Syrup Elects Our Presidents"

One of the main bottlenecks in our electoral process is New Hampshire. Every election, it gets first cut. Its inhabitants pass themselves off as some kind of Norman Rockwell poobahs. Well, my question is, who died and made them kingmakers? It just isn't fair. If the primaries were all at the same time my apartment building could vote as a bloc and cancel out the state's entire electoral body.

"The Granite State" -- it has a solid, permanent sound to it. A more accurate name would be "The small mammals by the side of the road state." "Live Free or Die," that's their motto. That's what it says on their license plates. But when you consider that those license plates are made in prison it makes you wonder how sincere it is.

I always thought of it as a threat...live free or die. But from the few times I've visited New Hampshire, as far as I can tell it's a reference to how cheap they are.

I don't mean to come down so hard on the state, I just feel a little leery about handing the future of our government over to a bunch of people I wouldn't even ask the time of day from. And a lot of these people are farmers. You can always tell by the hat. I know, because I have farmers in my family. Now don't get me wrong, farmers are good people. They love their crops and all, but they don't get out much.

Those that aren't farmers are truck drivers. Dwell on that for a moment; minutes after eating truck-stop food, these people are in the booth voting. As if that weren't frightening enough, I'll tell you something else about New Hampshire people: they get up early.

They're morning people. Do we want morning people choosing the candidates for the highest office in the free world? Morning people have a disturbing tendency to tyranny, as you know if you've ever lived with one. It's a known fact that every major dictator in history was a morning person.

Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe it's perfectly safe to place the destiny of our nation in the hands of a pack of maple-syrup-swilling squirrel worshippers. It just seems a little risky considering that hundreds of thousands of brave men, many of them night owls and slugabeds, died for our right to vote.