What Berlin, N.H. can teach Barack Obama

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

MANCHESTER, N.H. - What can Berlin, N.H., teach the rest of America about the presidential campaigns that just swept through town?

And what does Berlin's primary outcome teach Democratic candidate Barack Obama and his team of strategists?

Berlin, way up north in the White Mountains, is far off the beaten path, far from major airports or even an interstate highway. It's an old paper mill city where economic development is still a pipe dream.

People aren’t rich in Berlin. You can buy a three-bedroom, two-bathroom house there for $75,000. The closest Starbucks is 80 miles away.

When voters cast their ballots on Tuesday, Sen. Hillary Clinton crushed Obama in Berlin, beating him more than two to one.

She got 49 percent of the vote there, exceeding her statewide average of 39 percent.

Obama, with 22 percent, came in third in Berlin, just behind John Edwards, whose combative economic populist message seemed to play better in this mill town.

Another working-class town that's also a little rough around the edges is Claremont, where Clinton beat Obama, 43 percent to 35 percent, with Edwards drawing 17 percent.

Clinton also bested Obama in working-class towns on New Hampshire's Atlantic coast.

A reprise of Gore v. Bradley
In some ways, Tuesday's Clinton-Obama-John Edwards contest resembled the Al Gore and Bill Bradley's 2000 battle in New Hampshire.

Sounding like Obama eight years before Obama arrived on the scene, Bradley claimed to represent a “new kind of politics” – less partisan, more consensus-minded and less interested in settling scores.

In Berlin in 2000, Gore trounced Bradley, getting two out of every three Democratic voters.

“There’s a history in the New Hampshire primary of reform-minded insurgent candidates going against the more Establishment candidate who presents a traditional, bread-and-butter message,” said Dante Scala, a political scientist at the University of New Hampshire.

Slide show   New Hampshire weighs in Candidates, supporters absorb the results of the primary more photos

Scala thinks that Obama vs. Clinton fit this template.

“Match the Bill Bradley vote in 2000 against Obama and you’d see a lot of similarities” in where each ran strongest, Scala said.

“Working-class Democrats hear this talk about reform and change, and they wonder, ‘what’s it going to do for me?’” Scala said.

Lagging among lower-income voters
Exit poll interviews indicate that Clinton triumphed over Obama among voters with family incomes under $50,000, winning 47 percent of such voters to his 32 percent. Edwards got 16 percent.

Obama’s best-performing income group: the super-rich, those with incomes of more than $200,000, among whom he got 44 percent of the vote to Clinton’s 36 percent.

Unfortunately for Obama, the super-rich only made up 5 percent of Tuesday's electorate.

The Illinois senator also faces an age gap: Among New Hampshire voters over 65, 48 percent chose Clinton and 32 percent Obama.

Clinton also beat Obama by more than two to one among those who said they had not graduated from high school.

Catholics, mostly French-Canadian and Irish, make up a key segment of the Democratic electorate in New Hampshire and Obama didn’t seem to have great appeal for them, either.

He got 27 percent of self-identified Catholics; Clinton got 44 percent, while Edwards won 24 percent.

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