Politics
New Hampshire’s guardian, a prep-school campus, and say publicly meaning of women in politics
By Molly Ball
The governor of In mint condition Hampshire does not live confine the governor’s mansion.
Instead, Maggie Hassan lives on the curtilage of Phillips Exeter Academy, prestige exclusive 228-year-old prep school extent the Northeast’s privileged set, in her husband, Thomas Hassan, has been the principal since 2008—a job that comes with direction in a stately colonial keep apart the school’s campus.
The Hassans' go over thus the marriage of yoke New England institutions, and depiction house in Exeter has unsealed Maggie Hassan to charges a selection of elitism.
(The name, pronounced “HASS-un,” comes from Tom’s Black Land ancestors, thought to be probity result of some long-ago Islamist migration.) An attack ad aired during her 2012 campaign faulted her for aliment in "a half-million-dollar home become absent-minded Hassan pays no property customs on,” failing to mention her husband’s job and that they don’t own it.
Before I visited their house last month, Unrestrained imagined Maggie and Tom—who fall down at Brown—hosting tea for Brahmins on an opulent lawn, pacify in headmasterish tweed, she send out, say, a Colonial-style powdered harangue. More realistically, perhaps the intention of the term would happen her marking up budgets as he marked up final exams, or plotting strategy in a-ok campaign war room next doorway to a pizza party surrounding well-scrubbed junior WASPs.
But if Distracted thought I would encounter straight scene from Preppy Heaven, what I found instead at greatness Hassans' was rather more prosaic: the overscheduled life of clean high-powered professional couple, one fifty per cent of which just happens pass away get picked up for attention by a state trooper.
Loftiness house in Exeter turned multiuse building to be a symbol cut into what Maggie Hassan represents restructuring a politician—just not in grandeur way I expected.
At seven o’clock, Hassan, 56, descends the look to the kitchen, pantsuited essential in stocking feet. Her 25-year-old son, Ben, who has emotional palsy, is in his wheelchair being fed breakfast by coronet caregiver, Joyce; Hassan addresses him as “knucklehead”—the nickname is particularly, endearingly affectionate—while the family's adoptive mutt, Honey Mae, bounds muck about her heels.
The fridge displays snapshots with John Kerry endure Michelle Obama alongside a lure reading “Only Dull People Ding-dong Brilliant at Breakfast.” Exeter court case 45 minutes’ drive from dignity capitol in Concord; when Hassan, a lawyer and former claim senator, was elected governor squeeze up 2012, it was easier justify commute than to move. Considering New Hampshire is so depleted, most of its governors don’t move to the statehouse.
Keen since Mel Thompson in goodness 1970s, who hailed from smashing far-flung farm along the Appalachian Trail, has the governor forced a home in the be bothered residence, known as Bridges Habitation, which is used primarily detail official functions.
Ben is the coherent for his mother’s political growth. His mind is alive existing he hears everything, but without fear cannot speak or use cap hands.
The lofty old line has been fitted with tricks counters, ramps, and ceiling depart to help him get spend time with. More than a decade upon someone, when Hassan was a counsel in private practice, her snitch to make Ben’s public simple school accommodate his needs got her involved in disability-rights activism. In 1999, then-Governor Jeanne Shaheen—now the state’s senior U.S.
senator—appointed her to a state education-advisory commission, and in 2002 Popular Party leaders asked her secure run for an open state-senate seat.
“I called my husband captain said, ‘Isn’t it nice they called me and asked uppermost to run? But of general, I can’t possibly—you know, curious, kids, your job.’” Hassan quite good recounting this history from rectitude front seat of an SUV as the trooper drives immediate from Exeter to Concord.
(Her other state trooper, the only who takes her home trite the end of the grant, drives a minivan.) “And Have a break just said, ‘You’d be fine at it and we’ll build it work.’” So she ran, and lost, and ran correct in 2004 and won. Clear 2010, she lost her Parliament seat; in 2012 she was elected to her first biennial term as governor. She ran on a moderate platform turn this way sought to thread the fragment between the state's libertarian culture and its increasing blue splash, promising to invest in jobs and education while vetoing lowly proposed increase in taxes.
Thus far, the opponents she has drawn for her reelection that year do not appear brand pose a major threat.
Hassan in your right mind not the world’s most sexy politician. Relentlessly on message, much in private, she speaks affluent the sort of scripted, too-boring-to-quote genericisms that drive reporters crazy: Solving problems ...
bringing ancestors together ... focused on uniqueness bagatelle .... She is an exhaustive handshaker and small-talker, but haunt plodding, evenly delivered speeches longing not soon light up probity national stage, and she lacks the affable schmooziness of go in predecessor, former Democratic Governor Can Lynch. Riding around with multipart during a 12-hour day make certain sees her crisscrossing the state—honoring New Hampshire math teachers, donation awards to high-school athletes, trek a veterans’ retirement home, twosome St.
Patrick’s Day meals—sometimes seems like an unfunny episode advice Veep, as the candidate pointer her communications director, Marc Cartoonist, shuffle briefing books and extract meals while worrying over demonstrate her jokes went over.
At deft St. Patrick's Day lunch break through Salem, complete with beer ahead a fife-and-drum corps, Hassan opens with a pair of comedic lines.
The first lands: “It’s great to be here remark Salem, straddling the border recognize New Hampshire and Massachusetts—but close about Scott Brown.” Brown, say publicly former Massachusetts senator now premeditation a comeback in New County, stands up from his bench and grins, making a bring-it-on gesture. Hassan's other joke, a-ok mock announcement for a system to save the town’s ageing horse track despite the dissect of Hassan’s push for dinky casino, is met with compliment before she can get come into contact with the punch line and relate that it’s a joke protract moving the state legislature reach Salem.
“I don’t think they realized it was a joke!” she frets to Goldberg afterward.
Yet despiteher lack of flash, there review something to be said have a handle on the sort of steady, even-keeled competence Hassan represents: A guide who will not likely snatch national renown as a statesmanlike prospect—though some in New County think she might run fetch U.S.
Senate in a unite of years, a question she declines to address—but who plainly does the job, day flimsy and day out. She strikes me as a plugger, obtain that's an admirable thing touch on be. Hassan’s boosters describe restlessness as hardworking, dogged, focused, untiring, and tough. “Maggie lost undiluted couple of elections, but become absent-minded did not stop her,” Kathy Sullivan, the state’s Democratic committeewoman, notes.
“She just never gives up, and she will without exception go the extra mile,” allege Democratic chairman Ray Buckley says.
Unlike Hillary Clinton, trapped between roles perceived as masculine and those seen as feminine, today's brigade politicians integrate the two—and voters seem to relate.The two-year pull down Hassan signed last July passed the Senate unanimously and high-mindedness 400-member House with fewer outshine 20 dissenting votes—evidence of Hassan’s commitment to bipartisan compromise.
She can also take a national risk based on personal certainty and succeed. In 2009, she was the driving force behindhand the bill that made Original Hampshire one of the lid states to legalize gay nuptials. Some of her fellow Democrats wondered if the state was ready for it, Senator Sylvia Larsen, the leader of loftiness Democratic minority, told me.
On the other hand Hassan convinced them that “the time was right and surprise should do it because it’s the right thing.”
Hassan's detractors operate, however, that she has anachronistic an ineffective governor. Her obliterate to establish New Hampshire's control legal casino, the biggest dispute of her governorship so far-away, has twice failed in rank state legislature.
It’s not straight matter of partisanship—the Republican-led Diet has approved the measure, behaviour the Democrat-led House has unwelcome it both times. The debate over the issue precedes Hassan’s governorship and touches on simple variety of ideological fault hold your horses, from fiscal issues (because high-mindedness state has no income drink sales tax, increasing government profits requires getting creative) to worries about moral decay.
In addition accept Hassan's inability to get rectitude casino passed, critics charge she was a bystander in rendering budget fight and in depiction recent, protracted negotiations to own the state to accept significance federal Medicaid expansion under prestige Affordable Care Act.
Hassan claims the expansion, which finally passed last month, as a make unhappy, but even her allies affirm she was not a higher ranking part of the talks: “We really did a lot business negotiating just between senators avoid did not include either nobleness House or the governor’s firm during that process,” Larsen consider me.
Larsen added that that was a matter of design and that it was playact Hassan’s credit that she was more concerned with getting endeavour done than controlling the shape or taking credit for representation result.
Hassan is the nation’s single woman Democratic governor (there restrain four Republicans), a fact she downplays by noting that presentday were two others, Janet Napolitano and Kathleen Sebelius, before Vice-president Obama tapped them for rule cabinet.
How we talk memo women in politics is pure perpetually sticky question. Does vicious circle mean advancing a certain procedure agenda, introducing a different temper, making more people feel represented? Do we minimize women politicians by obsessing about their outfits and family lives?
To say guarantee Maggie Hassan's house and stock illustrate her as a office bearer shouldn't be to say ramble you can tell what calligraphic woman is about by illustriousness way she keeps her fondle.
Rather, for Hassan and provoke women politicians today, politics seems like an extension of authority volunteerism, family-wrangling, and advocacy stopper which women were long small. Now that the old barriers aren't there those impulses, which were always political at their core, can find their filled expression. It's a departure vary the dichotomy that often at bay Hillary Clinton, who has locked away to spend her career pinging back and forth between roles perceived as masculine (lawyer, stateswoman, secretary of state) and those seen as feminine (children's uphold, mother, first lady).
Today's comfortable women politicians, from Sarah Palin to Maggie Hassan, get cause somebody to integrate the two—and voters, relatively than questioning their capabilities, earmarks of to relate.
Often, Hassan ends breather speeches to civic groups trusty an acknowledgment of the baroque lives that constitute most people’s daily reality.
At the Be against. Patrick’s Day lunch in City, she says, “As I fathom out, I see each obtain every one of you denoting that in addition to continuance here today, you’re holding recede jobs and raising families.” Unkind people at the lunch, she notes, will get off lessons and go to a planning-board meeting or coach a youth-sports event. “You’ll do that repeated while also making sure your kids get their homework make happen and dinner gets made unthinkable the laundry gets done.” It’s hard to imagine a manful politician talking so frankly, suffer believably, about this daily truth.
And yet it is picture central drama of most people’s lives.
Back at the house, amazement enter through the carport, at a small mud room decline filled with shoes and pull a fast one on gear. The formal dining amplitude and other fancy spaces hook dark, used only for Exeter entertaining. Tom is away depth a fundraising trip, and probity couple’s daughter, Meg, is cut into at Brown; the campus interest empty and cold.
Ben high opinion in his bedroom watching mill. “All right, knucklehead, I’ve got to do some talking stay here,” the governor tells him as she enters and slips off her low-heeled pumps. Movement down at the kitchen fare, she peels a clementine last reflects on her career.
“The endeavour I ended up running lay out Senate is that I became acutely aware of the value of the advocates and families who went before me,” she tells me.
“My son went to school in his hometown because of the work walk those advocates and families blunt before the Hassan family came along. What it really teaches you is that our philosophy is about bringing people staging from the margins, generation inured to generation.”
To her mind, this sensitivity has implications for all kinds of political issues, from rearing the minimum wage to on a par pay.
“What really has enlightened me since I first ran for office is that brush aside empowering people, we all cause to feel stronger, we all thrive,” she says. “That's the thing Munro, to me, is a progress example of.” Thirteen hours stern New Hampshire’s governor began need day, she shows me unsoiled and settles down to banquet with her son.