The Union Leader endorsement: How big a deal?
As anticipated, on Sunday the New Hampshire Union Leader endorsed John McCain for president. Publisher Joseph McQuade acknowledged that he disagrees with McCain on important issues, especially campaign finance reform. However, he gave McCain high marks for being consistently pro-life and for having been correct about Iraq – both in perceiving early on the mistakes the Bush administration made and in figuring out the way forward.
Above all, though, the paper’s endorsement is based on McCain’s “competence, courage, and conviction.” The endorsement concludes:
When McCain was shot down and taken prisoner by the North Vietnamese, he was repeatedly beaten. When his captors discovered that his father was a top U.S. admiral, they ordered him released for propaganda purposes. But McCain refused, insisting that longer-held prisoners be released before him. So they beat him some more. He never gave in then, and he won't give in to our enemies now.
How much does the Union Leader’s endorsement matter? Some have noted that the majority of candidates (always Republicans) endorsed by the paper since 1948 did not win the primary. But this is mainly a function of the uncompromising conservatism of the Loeb family that ran the Union Leader from the mid 1940s until 2000. Under the Loeb family, the Union Leader endorsed the likes of John Ashbrook (over Nixon in 1972), Pete DuPont (1988), and Pat Buchanan (1992, over the incumbent president). The fact that the Union Leader’s man didn’t win in these cases doesn’t mean it wasn’t influential when making less idiosyncratic picks. Moreover, its idiosyncratic pick in 1996 (Buchanan) won the primary.
Now that McQuade has taken over, the Union Leader has become less stridently conservative. This reduces the relevance of past precedent and probably works in McCain's favor. Even an endorsement from the Loeb family, if one can imagine such a thing, would not have won McCain much favor with hard right voters. And the current endorsement may carry more weight with those on the center-right. In any case, the endorsement is bound to help McCain some.
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