After nine months of chasing presidential candidates around New Hampshire, I finally have to make up my mind and vote for someone.
What I was thinking when I started:
Over the years I've gotten increasingly frustrated with the way political campaigns are covered by the mass media. I don't want to hear about gaffes and slogans and sound bites. I want to know who would be a good President and what kinds of policies the different candidates favor.
This year I decided to do something about it by writing the kind of campaign coverage I want to see. I live in New Hampshire, so I have comparatively easy access to early candidate events. I've decided to go to one or two a month and report on them. The purpose of these reports is to help you figure out which candidate you want to support, if any.
I have a bias -- I'm a liberal who is particularly worried about our loss of freedom post-9/11 -- but I intend to be upfront about that bias rather than hiding it behind a veneer of false objectivity. When I started this project I hadn't picked a candidate to support in 2004, and I decided to share my journey. I hope to write reports that will be useful to people even if they wind up supporting someone other than the candidate I choose.
I don't expect there to be a race on the Republican side of the New Hampshire primary, so the candidates I review will probably all be Democrats. But if a Republican alternative to Bush shows up, I'll cover that race also.
These are the candidates I've seen so far:
Wesley Clark in Keene, NH on January 7, 2004
Bob Graham in Keene, NH on August 19, 2003
Dick Gephardt in Concord, NH on August 8, 2003
Joe Lieberman in Nashua, NH on July 31, 2003
Dennis Kucinich in Manchester, NH on May 30, 2003.
Howard Dean in Nashua, NH on May 7, 2003.
John Edwards in Nashua, NH on April 8, 2003.
John Kerry in Peterborough, NH on April 2, 2003.
Doug Muder
28 April
2003
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