CHAPTER 6

A MONTH AND A HALF before I visited Bill Shaheen’s law office in the seacoast town of Dover, his wife, Jeanne, had been elected to a second term in the US Senate. As a Democratic incumbent, she had managed to win in what was otherwise an excruciating year for members of her party. Shaheen was impressive in beating back a hard-fought campaign by her Republican challenger, former Massachusetts senator Scott Brown, whose charm and political dexterity had nearly been enough to overcome perceptions that he had—prepare to clutch your pearls—harbored politically opportunistic motives in relocating to New Hampshire to run for her seat. But Shaheen had too much clout, and her ties to the state ran too deep. The first female senator in New Hampshire’s history, she had served three two-year terms as governor prior to ascending to the Senate. She was the only woman in the history of this country who has been called both “Governor” and “Senator”—a singular feat befitting her unrivaled status as the gatekeeper to Democratic political life in New Hampshire, both as an officeholder and influencer. In short, Jeanne Shaheen was a one-woman Granite State institution.

And so, I expected a certain level of stateliness when I walked into the corner office that was occupied by the other half of New Hampshire’s most prominent political couple on that wintry morning. I’d never met Bill Shaheen before, but I knew that he had been almost as much of a power player in New Hampshire politics over the previous four decades—albeit mostly behind the scenes—as his wife was. He’d recently been elected as the DNC committeeman for New Hampshire and remained one of the most sought-after political operatives in the state for any Democratic candidate running at any level. So I was a little surprised when I entered Bill Shaheen’s office and saw that the person sitting behind his desk was dressed more like a hardware store clerk than a custodian of New Hampshire’s Democratic establishment. Shaheen wore a flannel shirt with a brown woven belt, which held up a pair of stonewashed jeans that I surmised had been purchased sometime before the fall of the Berlin Wall. He had a thick, northern New England accent and facial features that were as craggy as the nearby mountains. After I offered a brief introduction and sat down in the chair in front of him, he kicked up onto his desk his Nike low-tops, which were lined with white tube socks. His personality was as no-frills as his clothing—nothing like the silky smooth, expensively suited hucksters who tend to pull the levers of politics in Washington. Bill Shaheen was New Hampshire through and through. I liked him right away.

In spite of his dressed-down appearance, Shaheen did allow himself the indulgence of decorating his office with photos of himself and his wife posing with various Democratic presidential candidates over the decades. “Bill, thank you for ALL your help! You’re the best. Hillary,” read the inscription from the former secretary of state, whose 2008 New Hampshire presidential campaign Shaheen had co-chaired until he stepped down upon receiving blowback for raising Barack Obama’s adolescent drug use as a campaign issue. But from the beginning of our conversation, Shaheen was intent on hammering home the idea that he wasn’t a pretentious guy, as if his wardrobe choices hadn’t already made that abundantly apparent. “I come from shoe shop people,” he told me with pride, noting that neither of his parents had completed high school.

Shaheen’s first taste of presidential politics was imbued with the flavor of glue (he licked stamps for JFK while he was a student at Dover High School in 1960). After a stint in the army, he graduated second in his class from Ole Miss Law School in 1973 and then returned home to New Hampshire, where he became the city attorney in Somersworth and had his first child with Jeanne. Then one winter night in early 1975, he attended a political event at the Ramada Inn in Dover with about two dozen other people. The highlight was Jimmy Carter, a soft-spoken and little-known former governor of Georgia. Just about everyone else in attendance that night had been only mildly curious to hear what Carter had to say. Shaheen was more than curious. As one of the few people in the room who had some personal experience living in the Deep South (Jeanne had taught at the first integrated high school in Mississippi), he liked what he saw in Carter, who had famously vowed that segregation in Georgia was over forever. Standing before him was a good, honest man—not to mention a skillful politician and a centrist who could win in parts of the country that had become increasingly challenging for Democrats. And more important, Shaheen told me, sneakers still propped up on his desk, he could see that “Carter’s heart was in the right place.”

As Carter lingered for a while after the event, Shaheen approached him and said five words to the long-shot presidential candidate that would change both of their lives: “I want to help you.” Shaheen may have been brand new to presidential politics, but so was Carter. And lacking other good options in New Hampshire, the Georgian took him up on the offer. Soon after that meeting, Chris Brown—a young man who had coordinated Carter’s earliest Granite State efforts even before Shaheen got on board—called a statewide campaign meeting to elect a New Hampshire chairman. About three hundred people expressed some interest in attending. Eight of them actually showed up. As Shaheen recalls, all eight offered reasons they couldn’t take on what would be a demanding job—even for a candidate like Carter, who had very little chance. Shaheen, meanwhile, was the only one in the room who couldn’t come up with a good excuse on the spot. “I looked around the room and said, ‘Oh, fuck, what are we going to do now?’”

Shaheen agreed to the job before he notified his boss, who was a retired judge. “Listen, Judge,” Shaheen recalls telling him. “I’m going to help this guy Jimmy Cah-tah become president.”

“Jimmy who?” his boss replied.

“Jimmy Cah-tah.”

“Is he the guy who rides the white horse and sings songs?”

“That’s Jimmy Walk-ah,” Shaheen said. “This is Jimmy Cah-tah. He’s a peanut fah-mah.”

Shaheen told his boss that if he wasn’t going to be fired, he intended to take two and a half days per week to devote to the judge. Shaheen would work for Carter the other four and a half days a week (he intended to work through every weekend). His boss agreed to keep Shaheen on but under the condition that his pay be cut in half. That sounded fine to Shaheen, who then explained the situation to Carter. The candidate offered to make up the difference in his salary, but Shaheen declined. “I’m not doing this for you,” he recalls telling the Georgia Democrat. “I’m doing this for my country. You can’t pay me. I’m not taking your money. And if you were going to pay me for the hours I’m about to work, you couldn’t afford it.” That kind of financial sacrifice is rare in the modern, highly lucrative world of political consulting. But it is not unheard of among the small group that composes New Hampshire’s most sought-after senior campaign chairmen and women—people like Bill Shaheen, who continue to offer part-time services to candidates for free.

In this particular era, long before micro-targeting took hold, one of the Carter team’s vote-getting techniques in the early days of the campaign was to approach people at random on the streets of New Hampshire and offer them little bags of peanuts. Eventually, they had to stop because opponents suggested that the former peanut farmer’s campaign was illegally giving away something of value, in order to win votes. In New York, people who want to influence elections are disgraced for dispensing no-show patronage jobs and six-figure bribes. In New Hampshire, they’re shamed for offering peanuts.

After the peanut setback, Shaheen and the rest of his newbie New Hampshire crew continued to grind it out. “We worked all the time,” is the way Shaheen remembers the next year of his life heading into the February 1976 primary. “We worked so hard that we burned a couple kids out.” They were innovative as well as dogged. At a time when New Hampshire voters still selected delegates to the national party convention directly, Shaheen’s mother—an eighth-grade-educated ward clerk—warned her son that Carter’s voters were going to be confused about which prospective delegates they should pick. As a solution, she suggested that the campaign distribute to supporters sample ballots that highlighted the delegates they’d identified as Carter supporters. Shaheen crunched some numbers and determined that he needed $15,000 to complete the task. But when he asked the national campaign for the cash, his request was denied. Fortunately for him, and for the future president, a Carter campaign official from well-funded New York—who had identified the importance of New Hampshire to Carter’s hopes of winning the nomination—came through with the funds.

Carter’s original strategy had called for replicating the relatively laid-back style of campaigning that presidential candidates had typically employed in New Hampshire up to that point, limiting interviews and appearances in private and public venues. But to the frenetic and personable candidate, that strategy made no sense. From his first appearance in the state, Carter worked as hard as his young staffers did. In fact, he worked harder than any candidate who had ever run for president in New Hampshire, packing his schedule with as many small events and local interviews as he could fit in from dawn to dusk.

New Hampshire voters were impressed, and so were Carter’s opponents. As a staffer working for Arizona congressman Mo Udall—widely considered the leading “liberal alternative” to Carter—put it, the former Georgia governor worked “for a year as though it were the last six weeks of the campaign. That saturation campaigning made him impossible to beat.”

On the heels of a big January victory in Iowa, Carter proved that a Georgian who sounded the part could win way up north in New Hampshire, as he ended up with 28 percent of the vote in the February 24 primary—good enough for a six-point victory over Udall in a deeply splintered field. With his New Hampshire victory, Carter was on his way to the Democratic nomination and the presidency.

With his hands folded behind his head and his low-tops still resting atop his desk, Shaheen summed up the approach he had used when running a campaign in New Hampshire four decades earlier, a principle that remained unchanged into the second decade of the twenty-first century. “When you’re doing this for nothing, you can’t fake it,” he said. “The amount of time you put in, you can’t equate it with money. It’s all the time. I think about it, I dream about it. If I don’t believe in it, I’m not doing it.”