The toughest fight: Sen. John Sununu's travails in the Granite State

National Review, August 18, 2008 by Ramesh Ponnuru

DEMOCRATS have a chance this fall to build a majority in the Senate that is effectively filibuster-proof. To do it, they will have to defeat John Sununu, a Republican senator from New Hampshire. Pollster.com's average of polls has Sununu eleven points below his opponent, former governor Jeanne Shaheen. No other Republican incumbent is in worse shape: not Ted Stevens of Alaska, who is mired in scandal; not Roger Wicker of Mississippi, who was appointed to the Senate a few months ago to fill a vacancy. If Democrats cannot beat Sununu, they are unlikely to achieve their goal.

The senator has been in tight spots before. In 1996, he won his party's nomination for a House seat by getting 28 percent of the vote in a field of eight candidates. He was outspent by the Democratic candidate. In 2002, he launched a primary campaign against a sitting Republican senator, the erratic Bob Smith. He was again outspent, and some of the polls were close, but Sununu won. He then faced Shaheen. She outspent him, too, but he beat her by four points. Shaheen argues that it was the national climate a year after 9/11 that beat her; their rematch this year takes place under very different political circumstances.

If she wins, Republicans will have lost one of their most libertarian-minded members. Sununu voted against the Republicans' energy bill, transportation bill, and prescription-drug bill because they spent too much money. He thinks prisoners in the War on Terror should be able to challenge their detention in federal court. He voted against the Federal Marriage Amendment on federalism grounds. He has been a strong advocate of letting people invest some of their Social Security funds for themselves. He has tried to keep Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from being able to take ever-bigger risks with taxpayer money.

Being a small-government conservative in Washington in recent years has meant losing most battles, but not all of them. Sununu succeeded in passing legislation to block taxes on Internet access, for example. He led a fight to make the Patriot Act more protective of civil liberties, joining a filibuster and winning some concessions. Being a small-government conservative has also often meant being at odds with the Bush administration, as his record on many of those issues demonstrates. Sununu was the first Republican senator to call for Alberto Gonzales to step down as attorney general. He bucked the administration, as well, on immigration. When the bipartisan Iraq Study Group issued its recommendations in late 2006, Sununu was notably more receptive to them than the administration, which regarded them as a glorified surrender.

An engineer by training, Sununu is very smart. He is also the youngest senator. But Sununu does not seem to have come across to his colleagues as a know-it-all, notwithstanding some jokes that John McCain makes while campaigning in New Hampshire. In this respect, Sununu's reputation differs markedly from that of his father, who was often faulted for his arrogance. (The elder John Sununu was a brilliant engineer who became New Hampshire's governor, chief of staff to the first President Bush, and a host of Crossfire.)

Shaheen's strategy in the Senate race is pretty simple: tie Sununu to an unpopular president, an unpopular war, and unpopular economic conditions. It is the sort of campaign that could be run against just about any Republican in just about any state. She is, in short, hoping that a Democratic tide washes her ashore. The complacence of that strategy offers Sununu some hope.

New Hampshire Democrats take every opportunity to point out that Sununu has voted with President Bush 85 percent of the time--which isn't surprising, considering that he is a Republican. Sununu's comeback: "I vote with New Hampshire 100 percent of the time." He adds, "In 2003, my first year in the United States Senate, Republicans advanced an energy bill that spent too much money, was filled with unnecessary subsidies, and I led the effort to defeat it and we succeeded. I wasn't looking for a fight in my first year in the Senate but it just wasn't a good bill for taxpayers; it wasn't a good bill for the people of New Hampshire. ... I've never hesitated to vote the interests of New Hampshire whether the legislation was put forward by Republicans or Democrats."

Shaheen herself backed the invasion of Iraq during her 2002 run. Now she says that President Bush misled the country into war. Earlier this year she was reported as complaining that we were "five years into a war we were told would last a matter of weeks." Her own account, taken at face value, makes her sound gullible and unserious. The success of the surge may also have made this issue less effective for Shaheen.

The economy, too, may not work quite as much in Shaheen's favor as she had thought. On gas prices, Sununu's advocacy of more drilling will probably beat her calls for a crackdown on oil companies and speculators. New Hampshire has not been a high-foreclosure state, meanwhile, and Sununu has taken a lead on housing issues. He has been getting more active on health care, too. He supports a large tax credit to help individuals who do not get health insurance through their jobs buy it for themselves. He also thinks that individuals and businesses ought to be able to buy insurance across state lines. (Freeing interstate commerce is something of a theme in Sununu's legislation.)