Primaries Bring Big-Name News To Small Paper

CONCORD, N.H. —  One cub reporter asked bachelor Dennis J. Kucinich out on a date because she thought he was cute. Another boarded a plush campaign bus to interview Rep. Dick Gephardt and suddenly gushed: “Hey, sweet ride, Congressman!” Then they talked about pies.

And one colleague was riding in the back seat of an SUV with Vice President Al Gore in 2000 when the struggling candidate turned to the novice, young enough to be his son, and asked what he was doing wrong in his New Hampshire campaign.

Meet the staff of the Concord Monitor, the 21,000-circulation daily newspaper that every four years enjoys unrivaled access to the men and women who would be president.

Long before the national media horde arrives, the Monitor’s 14 reporters track candidates on stump visits ranging from feisty sewing circles at old folks homes to fall foliage festivals.

For Monitor reporters, such behind-the-scene access brings with it the heady rush of having national personalities know your name and return your calls. For the editorial staff, it means being courted by solicitous candidates so anxious for an endorsement they call the editor at home to make their pitch.

But the paper knows its influence on the campaign trail lasts only as long as the White House hopefuls reach out to valuable New Hampshire voters through their local newspaper.

On Wednesday, the day after the New Hampshire primary, the political circus will abandon the state for the next campaign stop. Those are blue days around the Monitor newsroom -- when the paper’s high-riding coach of news coverage changes back to a plain old local pumpkin.

Then staffers, many in their early 20s, return to covering the school board meetings and local sewer issues that are the stuff of small-town dailies.

“It’s not true depression but more like ‘Do I really have to go back to covering this stuff?’ ” said Monitor editor Mike Pride. “They go from reporting on why Howard Dean didn’t back sending troops to Iraq to whether a local town should buy a new school bus.”

Yet while the show’s still on, Monitor staffers seek to scoop more-seasoned reporters from big-name papers and TV network crews -- an often pushy crowd who assume their status gives them entitlement to the figures they cover.

But sometimes the little paper bests them all.

“In 2000, Gore gave me all this exclusive access,” said reporter Alec MacGillis. “He’d give a speech and a security guy would motion toward a back door and I’d ride with him to his next stop while the national media was left behind screaming at him.”

MacGillis, now 29 and covering the New Hampshire primary for the Baltimore Sun, misses the face time: “Now I’m just part of the pack.”

At the Monitor, access to presidential candidates goes all the way to the top. After editor Pride became sick with pneumonia, retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark called and North Carolina Sen. John Edwards sent him a get-well letter. One day, Pride was escorting former Illinois Sen. Carol Moseley Braun out following her pre-endorsement interview when they bumped into Clark coming up the stairs.

It’s all just a regular day for the Monitor during the hectic primary season.

“The candidates know that New Hampshire voters in places like Concord read the Monitor, not the Washington Post,” said Pride. “It gives us leverage.”

At first, Philadelphia native Amanda Parry didn’t want to come to a provincial city such as Concord where starting reporters make less than $25,000 a year. “I was like, ‘Are you kidding?’ but I couldn’t pass up a shot at covering the primary.”

The paper starts each presidential primary season with a fresh crop of reporters who learn on the run. And at the Monitor, campaign coverage starts early. In December 2001, two years before primary day, reporter Lisa Wangsness noted in a political column item that former Vermont Gov. Dean already had crossed the border into New Hampshire several times.

She asked whether he was scoping out voter response for a possible presidential run. “The next day I get this voice mail message,” she said. He said, “ ‘Lisa, this is Gov. Dean. Actually I know New Hampshire quite well. I’ve been all over the state.’ I thought it was cute. It showed he was reading us.”

The Monitor covers the daily twists and turns -- from this week’s debate to Dean’s predicament after his raging Des Moines speech -- but also takes a step back. Parr, writing of Dean’s newfound penchant for sweaters, included this quote from a style consultant: “I respect Mr. Rogers. I just don’t want to have him as my president.”

And a Halloween story about candidates’ costume preferences brought insight: When Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts was 7 years old, he tried to win a contest with a scarecrow outfit his mother made, before the pumpkin toppled from his shoulders and broke. “It was a day of disappointments,” the Democratic frontrunner confessed. “I was in tears.”

Rep. Kucinich of Ohio told of wearing a knight’s armor to a recent party -- and having to be pulled from his car after he became stuck behind the steering wheel.

One Monitor story, said reporter Meg Heckman, featured elderly women “with pink fuzzy slippers and pastel house coats grilling Dick Gephardt on Medicare.” Another reporter recalled being assigned to cover a party attended by an early contender, Florida Sen. Bob Graham. Arriving unprepared, Sydney Leaven learned to her horror of the tradition that the Monitor reporter spend five minutes interviewing the candidate.

“My face dropped until Graham’s wife stepped up and said ‘You don’t have to do it, if you don’t want to,’ ” said Leaven, adding that she quickly called her editor for a primer on some insightful questions.

Some Monitor reporters are on their own with candidates.

MacGillis recalled how Gore once asked his advice about his then-stumbling New Hampshire campaign against Bill Bradley: “I was in this awkward position as a young kid trying to be tactful, so I concentrated on Bradley and how he was just a fresh face.”

One Monitor photographer stood in Joe Lieberman’s Manchester kitchen as his wife, Hadassah, joked that the Connecticut senator’s daily ration of canned salmon was “his cat food.”

Another once followed candidate Bill Clinton into a restroom and watched as the Arkansas governor helped a man in a wheelchair who had become stuck inside a stall.

But in a few days, the end will come. Monitor reporters expect the sudden snub of politicians who will no longer take their calls -- such as Jimmy Carter and Arizona Sen. John McCain, who forgot the paper faster than a C-student would drop first-period chemistry.

We don’t take it personally,” said City Editor Hans Schulz. “We don’t expect them to call back.”

At least, not until the next round of primaries.