Manchester, New Hampshire, is not exactly a culinary hot spot. Eating three meals in a single day at Dunkin’ Donuts is not (entirely) unheard of. Restaurants in the Queen City—not kidding, that is Manchester’s nickname—tend to close on the early side too, which makes for slim pickings for a hungry campaign reporter returning to home base after a day of driving the Granite State.
Enter the Puritan Backroom, the best little restaurant—and political must-stop—in the state. Where else can you in the back eat a heaping of the best chicken fingers this side of, well, anywhere and then stroll/roll around to the front for some ice cream, all the while carrying a fifty-fifty chance of seeing a presidential candidate doing the exact same thing?
The Puritan’s successful run in New Hampshire goes back well before the state moved its primary to the front of the presidential nominating calendar in 1976. It was founded in 1917 as an ice cream and candy shop, but a year later a restaurant was added. The original Puritan location was across the street from city hall in downtown Manchester. “Right from the beginning politics was regularly infused into the business,” said Chris Pappas, the current owner of the business. (His great-grandfather—Arthur Pappas—was one of the restaurant’s original founders.)
Though the Puritan has now moved just outside of downtown Manchester, it has established itself as a must-stop for politicians trying to reach the ever-flinty (and somewhat indecisive) New Hampshire primary voter.
Sargent Shriver loved the Puritan so much that he ended virtually every day he spent in the state during the 1972 presidential race with a dinner of barbecued lamb kabobs at the restaurant. Joe Lieberman was at the Puritan so much during his 2004 presidential bid that the restaurant not only named a flavor of ice cream after him (“Cup of Joe”) but also did the same for his wife, Hadassah (“Heavenly Hadassah”)! Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator, tended bar for a night at the Puritan in support of Al Gore’s 2000 New Hampshire campaign. New Mexico governor Bill Richardson held his 2008 primary night “party” at the Puritan. (He finished fourth with 4.6 percent of the vote.)
In the final weekend before that 2008 New Hampshire primary, Hillary Clinton rented out the Puritan’s conference center and turned it into a call center; she even held a get-out-the-vote rally in the Puritan parking lot forty-eight hours before her comeback victory in the Granite State. “I like to think all the chicken tenders and coffee for the volunteers fueled her upset victory,” said Pappas. (Worth noting: Barack Obama is one of the few presidential aspirants to have never set foot in the Puritan. Draw your own conclusions.)
On the Saturday before the Tuesday primary in 2012, former Utah governor Jon Huntsman and his wife stopped by the Puritan to pick up an order of bulk chicken tenders—yum—as a thank-you for his staff and supporters. “The place was basically shut down for the ten minutes he was here and we had to usher him out through the kitchen because the crush of media was so huge,” said Pappas. (He noted that a few months earlier Huntsman had stopped by the Puritan with only a few staff in tow to shake hands; the full-court crush of media and other political hangers-on begins about two months before the actual vote.) The Puritan magic did not work for Huntsman; he finished third.
Heck, even Sarah Palin, that most famous of (non)candidates, stopped by the Puritan the night before a Tea Party rally at the statehouse in September 2011. Like most of Palin’s political events, this one was unannounced and “caused a stir,” recounted Pappas. A couple was getting married at the restaurant that night and posed for pictures with Palin. “We’ll never forget that Sarah Palin came to our wedding,” the couple was overheard saying. I’ll bet.
Pappas says the restaurant’s centrality to the New Hampshire political landscape is due in large part to the cross section of Granite Staters it attracts. He explained: “We have our share of elderly customers who have been coming here for decades. We draw business types for lunch and families for dinner and on the weekends. Younger people come out for the chicken tenders and mudslides.”
About those tenders, of which I have consumed dozens during my trips to New Hampshire: the Puritan started making them in the mid-1970s as a favor to their chicken supplier, who had pieces left over after cutting up chicken breasts for the menu. Pappas said that the tenders “took off immediately,” and the restaurant now sells more than 1,000 pounds of tenders a day. (That’s a lot of tenders.) How are they so much better than your run-of-the-mill grossness from McDonald’s and Burger King? “They’re marinated overnight, breaded and fried to order, and served with homemade sweet-and-sour sauce,” explains Pappas. “They’re different from many others because the chicken is real chicken meat (not processed), and the marinade gives them a unique sweet flavor.”
The Puritan—and its rich political history and chicken tenders—speaks to the centrality of retail politicking to running a presidential primary campaign.
Even in this age of twenty-four-hour cable news, Twitter, and people texting their friends who happen to be sitting right next to them, places like the Puritan prove that there is still no replacement for gripping and grinning with voters.
The first three states in both the Republican and Democratic presidential nomination fights—Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina—are all states in which retail politics is still king (or queen).
When Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City, made his maiden visit to Iowa during his 2008 presidential campaign, he traveled in a phalanx of black SUVs—speeding from stop to stop with virtually no unscripted interaction with actual voters. Not even the man who was credited with leading the country through the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, could get away with acting like that. Iowa voters balked. As did New Hampshire voters. And South Carolina voters. Giuliani staked his campaign on the decidedly non-retail state of Florida—the way to win in the Sunshine State is to just dump millions of dollars on television—but by the time the race got to that point, it was already over for Giuliani.
The man who surged in his place? Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, whom no one had heard of until he started showing up at every meeting where two or more Iowans were gathered. Huckabee got retail politicking in a way no one else in the field—not John McCain and certainly not Mitt Romney—did. Huckabee loved the hurly-burly of politics in a way not seen since the last politician from Hope, Arkansas—a guy named William Jefferson Clinton—hit the national stage.
The ability to actually talk to other human beings is underrated in our political process. After all, if you can’t relate in ways small and big to the people you want to represent, why should you be representing them at all?
Campaigns aren’t won on paper. If they were, Bill Bradley (Rhodes scholar, NBA great, U.S. senator) would be president and Meg Whitman (billionaire executive) would be the governor of California. Places like the Puritan and the Iowa State Fair and any number of barbecue joints in South Carolina force candidates to prove their mettle, to wade into a group of skeptics and convince them.
For those who argue that retail politics has little to do with what you actually do when you are elected president, here’s my response: What is diplomacy if not using your powers of persuasion to convince foreign leaders of the rightness of a certain course of action? And how do you get your signature pieces of legislation through Congress? Convincing a relatively small group of influential leaders that you understand their concerns and believe this is the right course for them to take.
Retail politics is at the heart of who we are—or at least who we should be—as a body politic. The Puritan Backroom isn’t just about stuffing your face full of chicken tenders—although that’s not a bad option. It’s about showing and proving you have what it takes to represent the hopes and dreams of an entire country.