Six years ago New Hampshire Sen. Jeanne Shaheen was opposed in her successful re-election bid here by former Massachusetts Senator Scott Brown. And it looks like history is repeating itself in 2020 as another out-of-stater, the very deep-pocketed Bryant “Corky” Messner, fresh from the state of Colorado where he has lived his whole life. has thrown his Rocky Mountain cap into the ring. His main opponent in the September GOP primary will be conspiracy-theory king Donald Bolduc.

But the nagging problem Messner will encounter if he gets to the general election in November, aside from Shaheen’s stellar record of accomplishment here, is that virtually all of his campaign funding since he announced his candidacy in September, 2019 has come from his home state. He has solicited and received many financial contributions for over a year, all addressed to his campaign office in Denver, Colorado payable to the ‘Messner NH Exploratory Committee’ there. In addition, all of his recent monetary contributions to local NH Republicans have listed his home address as Denver, Colorado. And despite owning a home in Wolfeboro since 2007 he only cast his first New Hampshire vote here in November 2018.

This all hearkens back to Brown’s similar 2014 attempt to cast his image as a genuine Granite State lifer, until the debates and meet-and-greets began and he found trouble articulating many basic, elementary facets of New Hampshire life, which included many geographic and economic gaffes. One guesses that Messner is spending much of his time boning up on facts and figures pertaining to our state leading up to his actual upcoming appearances here. But in any case his starting line is already far behind the estimable and authentically-New Hampshire Jeanne Shaheen, who has served two terms as state senator, three terms as Governor, and two terms as US Senator in Washington.

Predictably the GOP camp has been doing their usual lowbrow bandying-about lately of terms like “socialist”, “radical” and “dangerous” to describe Shaheen. These terms have long been hot-button knee-jerkers that galvanize most hard-line conservatives into action against the named “radical-socialist” candidate.

The truth of the matter is that Jeanne Shaheen is neither a socialist nor a radical, as anyone who has followed her distinctive Granite State career knows full well. That is unless you think that working as Governor to keep children’s health care costs down (SCHIP), reining in college tuition costs, balancing budgets with neither a sales nor an income tax, cutting energy bills for small and large businesses, along with a plethora of other state-level enhancements is being a “dangerous” governor. And in her two US Senate terms she has kept the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard funding and employment strong, allocated funds for the ongoing widening of Route 93, pushed for tough drinking water statutes in the face of Donald Trump’s weakening of every environmental law he can affect, and increased funding tenfold to address the opioid epidemic re: treatment centers and first-responders.

As a member of the Armed Services Committee, and the only woman on the Foreign Relations Committee, Jeanne is a leading voice on national security matters, and remains a global leader for women’s rights, as well as helped to pass legislation to give America’s veterans more options for necessary health care closer to their residences.

Another silly notion in this election year is the usual “tax-and-spend Democrat” moniker that will be more and more prevalent from the conservative camp over the next 3 1/2 months. The only rejoinder necessary for that canard is to simply point out that under Donald Trump’s economy the US national debt has gone from $14 trillion to over $23 trillion from 2017-2020, after he campaigned on eliminating the debt entirely in 2017.

If elected, Messner would be just another aider-and-abettor added onto the presidential train wreck that we have all witnessed for over three years. Now more than ever New Hampshire needs the steady and sensible stewardship that Shaheen has given us in her various posts for three decades. America’s systemic destruction has to stop on November 3, and keeping Jeanne Shaheen in the Senate is a large and important cog in that wheel.

Newsletter