March 12, 2009

The rebuilder
A conversation with John H. Sununu
By Jeff Mucciarone jmucciarone@hippopress.com

Former New Hampshire Gov. John H. Sununu has served in a variety of roles during his distinguished career, from engineer to governor to White House chief of staff to the host of CNN’s Crossfire. He and his wife, Nancy, even took on hog wrangling duties for a year in their town. (The pair were named honorary hog reeves in Hampton Falls, which means they were the go-to tandem for rounding up the town’s loose pigs.)  But at 69, his latest post as chairman of the state Republican Party may prove to be one of the most challenging roles he’s played so far. Earlier this year, Sununu, who served as the state’s governor from 1983 to 1989, took the reins of the party from prior chairman Fergus Cullen, who opted against running again since Sununu wanted the post 

He takes over a party that was beaten badly both in New Hampshire and nationally in the November 2008 election. His son, John, lost in his bid for reelection to the United States Senate. Longstanding Republican Sen. Judd Gregg nearly left the Senate to be President Barack Obama’s Commerce Secretary and then abruptly turned around on that post and quickly added he won’t seek reelection in 2010. In addition, Democratic incumbents bested their Republican challengers in both Congressional races and in landslide fashion for the governor’s office. While Republicans did pick up some seats in the state House of Representatives, the majority still goes heavily to Democrats, who also held their majority in the state Senate. On top of all that, recent studies coming out of the University of New Hampshire say Democrats are taking over the Granite State. New voters are siding with Democrats. People moving into the state — not all from Massachusetts — are already Democrats when they arrive. The result, UNH researchers say, is a much bluer New Hampshire.

But Sununu isn’t backing down — not even close. Soon after last fall’s election, the man who was Chief of Staff for President George H.W. Bush went on the offensive. He offered strong criticism, a good portion of which was aimed directly at Gov. John Lynch and his Democratic counterparts, who Sununu says are guilty of overspending.

Back into the swing
I sat down with Sununu at his home Friday, Feb. 27, to talk with him about a wide range of topics. We conducted a follow-up phone interview Tuesday, March 3. We started off with his reasons for getting back into politics.

Why did you decide to reenter the ring, so to speak?
Well, New Hampshire is really such a great state, and I saw it changing dramatically for the worse. I have kids and grandkids that I want to be able to enjoy the state and all the benefits of the state the same way I did. And I felt that if I didn’t get involved, it might never get restored to where it should be. I really do believe that over the last 10 to 12 years — now with the new administration coming in, it’ll be 12 out of 14 years of Democratic rule in the state — that the state really has lost a great deal. We’ve lost a lot of the quality of life. We’ve lost a lot of the aspects of local control which kept our citizens involved and self-governing. We’ve shifted power from cities and towns to Concord. And we have lost the fiscal discipline and the management discipline that made this a very well-run state that people really loved living in. It’s still a good state, but not as good as it used to be. It used to be a great state. And we have to try and help restore it. I saw that one of the biggest problems was that Democrats campaign well and govern terribly. But I also recognized that the problem was a problem within the Republican Party where we have not defined the difference between ourselves and the Democrats in a way that registered with the voters, and in a way that explained why the Republican traditional way of doing things really was done for the benefit of the state over the last half century.

Now that you’re back into it, do you feel energized or reinvigorated?
I’m dangerous.

How so?
I’ve started to get back into the details of issues, like budgets, like the integrity of the public employee retirement system, like the policies on helping cities and towns govern themselves, on issues like the school funding issues, the school control issue. And as I get back into the details, I am a bit energized, but I, unfortunately, get more and more disappointed because I’m finding out things were even worse than I thought when I agreed to accept the responsibility of coming back.

Was there sort of a specific moment that you look back to, maybe in the last year, where you said, “I have to get back involved”?
Yeah, it was a family intervention. My sons, my wife, kids came in one day and said “We have to talk to you.” I said, “What’s it about?” And they said, “Well, everybody’s been asking you to consider being chairman of the party — we think you have to take it.” And I had the funny feeling that I couldn’t get out of the room if I didn’t say yes. So I said yes.

Now that you’re back in, what are you hoping to accomplish?
What I have to do is help define the difference between the two parties in a way that can be communicated, not just by me, but by the Republicans involved [in] the political process across the state. Secondly, I have to raise some resources, because, frankly, money and people are the tools you use to get messages out. I’ve had to make sure what was a little bit of a, what was a few splinters inside the party, came together and I think we’ve succeeded on that. And by doing all three of the above, I hope to get the most important result, and that is to excite good candidates to run for political offices in the 2010 election.

On Tuesday, I asked Sununu essentially why he’s the right man for the job.

What attributes do you bring to the table that can help get Republicans back on track in New Hampshire?
Warmth and charm. [laughter] I’ve been involved in the process long enough to understand how hard work is really required and I’m willing to put that in. I know the issues quite well. I know how to articulate and how to define a sharply defined, well-differentiated political message. But warmth and charm, of course, are the most important.

What are you working on now?
Right now we’re out trying to help modernize a little bit the administrative side. Trying to upgrade things with new technology. I’ve got to go out and raise some money. Talking to candidates, getting candidates interested again. And trying to pull the party together and create the messages that we’ve talked about that I think are important for Republicans to speak with a single voice on.

Rebuilding the party
Following the 2008 election, the Hippo ran a piece looking into what the Republican Party needs to do to reestablish itself in the state. Some said the emphasis should be on a re-branding of its message. Others said the GOP needed to develop strong, younger candidates. Others simply thought Republicans were hurt terribly by President George Bush’s time in office and that things would more or less swing back into balance within a few years. I talked with Gov. Sununu about candidates, formulating a message and his son’s future in politics.

If you were to just build the perfect candidate, the perfect Republican candidate, what type of attributes would you think of?
Well, New Hampshire is still, I believe, a right-of-center state. It is a state that cares about the quality of governing, so I need a candidate that is capable of giving good governing on the basis of their experience. It is a state that cares about communities. We have a strong sense of family and community in New Hampshire. And so somebody who understands what makes New Hampshire different from the neighboring states. We have a lot more, traditionally have had a lot more local control and raising of money at the local level and participation of our citizens on the boards of selectmen and the school boards and the budget committees and the finance committees or the city councils. And so, somebody who understands that special chemistry of the state and can articulate it to the people, because sometimes people have a sense of what it is but can’t frame in their mind what it is they like until somebody is able to point out to them what makes it different. I think that’s an important attribute. Somebody who has a quantitative sense for the financial issues because budgets are important in New Hampshire — state budgets, local budgets. Somebody who has a sense of fiscal responsibility, because we need to have management discipline and direction on making sure that we, at this time, restore the integrity of the public employee retirement fund. And somebody who can speak with a strong conservative philosophy in a way that makes folks in the middle, philosophically, feel comfortable. So it’s basically somebody who is conservative, who understands the complexity of all these issues in such a way that they can present them to people who consider themselves more centered.

Who are some people that you’re thinking of in the Republican Party?
Well, I really don’t want to identify names right now, but there are folks that have been very good public servants in the past that are role models for the kind of people we’d like to bring in — Sen. [Judd] Gregg, former Sen. [John] Sununu, Jeb Bradley in Congress, Charlie Bass in Congress, Steve Merrill. Those are the kinds of people that I think fit the description I gave you and are the kinds of people that we want to encourage to run. I think the Republican leadership in the House, the New Hampshire House and the New Hampshire Senate, also represent that kind of mixture of conservative and understanding of issues in a way that they can communicate not only to the conservative side of the state but [to] the undeclareds in the middle.

On Tuesday Sununu offered a few more details on developing candidates.

How do you develop strong candidates? Where do you look?
We’ll look for people who have otherwise demonstrated in their careers and in their commitment to Republican principles, local officials, or people who have been involved in the grassroots structure of the party. Like any process ... you see people who work hard, and you encourage them to move up the ladder.

Some on the Republican side have said that though Democrats are holding majorities, that Republicans actually have the deeper bench. Do you see it that way?
I do see it that way. We certainly have Republicans as mayors in the two largest cities in the state, as well as other communities. We have strong leadership in the House and Senate. Frankly, we have strong folks in the private sector who have expressed interest in getting involved in the political structure of New Hampshire.

Sununu’s son, John, spent six years in Congress before beating former governor and now-Senator Jeanne Shaheen in 2002 to grab a spot in the U.S. Senate. Shaheen returned the favor by ousting Sununu in 2008.

Talk a little bit about your initial thoughts when your son first entered politics. As a father, what did that make you think?
That’s a very interesting question. We were not, in the house, a very political family. I have eight kids, eight wonderful kids — three daughters, five boys, five sons. And inside the doors of the family, it was just a non-political family, and so I was somewhat surprised when John said he wanted to run for Congress. And I was even more surprised when I said, “I think you ought to think about it,” and over the weekend, he borrowed — unbeknownst to Nancy or me — our call lists and probably made a couple of hundred telephone calls. When we sat down to talk about it the following week, he let us know that he’d already lined up support from the North Country to the Seacoast to Keene, through Concord, Manchester, Nashua. So when we saw that he had done the hard work — that’s the hard part of politics is making the first contacts — we wished him good luck and watched. And he ran a great campaign and got elected to Congress, served six years and got elected to the Senate. The interesting thing was if you had asked me before he had told us what he wanted to do, he would not have been the one of the eight children that I would have put on the top of the list as the most likely. But he did well.

Do you think we’ll see him in politics again? His name gets mentioned a lot.
It gets mentioned a lot. I don’t know. I think he needs, as of the time we’re doing this interview, he’s been out about a month and a half. I think he needs two, three months to decompress, get a sense of being back out and then he obviously has to make a judgment that’s best for himself, his family and the state. And nobody can do that for you. You have to do that by yourself with your family.

You’ve been in and then you’re out. What is that like, that transition?
I’ve been very lucky. I’ve had a lot of careers. I’m an engineer. I ran a small business, was professor of engineering, dean of engineering, governor, chief of staff, then back in the private sector, did Crossfire for six years. I loved everything I did when I was doing it. I’ve been very fortunate that way. And so I don’t think of it as a chance so much as a new opportunity. And even this transition is in the same category. It’s not unusual for me to find something slightly different to do for a different period of time. Nancy says it’s because I can’t hold a job.

Democrats took the young vote in dramatic fashion nationally and in the Granite State. We discussed how he plans to get back younger voters and how he plans to combat what appears to be some changing demographics in the state.

There’s been some studies and reports that came out, obviously a little closer to the election in the fall, that seem to be suggesting that the state is shifting more Democrat. Young voters going Democrat. People moving in already are Democrat. What do you do to combat that?
Looking at the election results from 2008, everybody had seemed to have been a Democrat. I think that was just the tide of the times. The pendulum swings in one direction and then comes back and swings in the other direction. I still believe that fundamental, good Republican values represent the majority of the people in the state of New Hampshire. I know the registration has shifted slightly to the Democrats’ favor, but I really do believe that the bulk of the undeclareds are really Republicans. And part of our job is to put the issues forth, put them forward in such a way that people are reminded of where they really want to be politically and come back to the party. People came to New Hampshire for a reason. They came to New Hampshire because they liked the quality of government. They liked the sense of community. They liked the quality of life. Those things don’t come by accident. They are reflections of a result of a political philosophy that is fundamentally Republican. I find it interesting when people talk about the current governor that one of the attributes they said that is his most important asset is that he sounds like a Republican. And I’m sure that’s deliberate. Remember, Democrats didn’t get successful in running for governor in New Hampshire in recent years until they started taking the Republican pledge.

If some of these studies are to be correct, at least on the level of the younger voters, it would seem Republicans would need to have a message that is reverberating with the younger voters. So how do you do that?
I can’t believe that younger voters support excessive spending either at the state level or the federal level. If I were a younger voter, I would be appalled at the spending legislation that is being pushed through Congress today. If I were a younger voter, I would say that’s not fair, they’re spending now and hoping that I’ll pay for it later. So there are these fiscal issues, these fiscal issues really do affect the younger voters. I think younger voters are also very much concerned with the issue of sense of community. I think they like being in a place, in a state where they can influence the policies that impact them most on a daily basis. And those are the policies that come out of our community, at least where the state allows that to happen. And the erosion of that capacity I think is something that young people would be worried about. And most importantly, if you’re a young public employee and you hear that the state public employee retirement system has billions of dollars of unfunded liability, I don’t think you’re going to be very happy with the Democratic administrations that caused that problem.

Sununu said Tuesday party officials were making the rounds at New Hampshire colleges to ascertain younger support.

How do you get college-age voters excited about Republican ideas?
Well, you start by talking to college Republicans and frankly, ask them to be major spokesmen in a very active way in their own campuses, at the college meetings that they go to. The best messengers for the young are the young that understand the issues.

Are younger folks who are engaged in politics hard to come by?
No, no. We’ve already had two or three meetings with college Republicans around the state. They’re very excited. They’re well-attended and they’re interested.

Regardless of age, does the Republican Party need to develop a more coherent message? How do you do that?
The message is a very important part of what the Republicans have not done well up to now in the last few years. And so what we have to do is put forward not a complicated message, a message about leaner, more efficient government, good management, fiscal control, lower taxes, local control and return of the power to the cities and the towns.

I think people would mostly agree that Republicans have stood for anti-tax and anti-overspending, but beyond that, are there other issues that Republicans need to do a better job in New Hampshire of relating to voters?
Well, I think Republicans have had a long tradition in this state of being a good party for the environment, a good party for open space. When I was governor I had acquired tens of thousands of acres of land from the private sector for the State of New Hampshire. I think those are issues that we continue to support and are attractive to young people. I think young folks do recognize that we need a good energy policy in this country, and frankly, there is no way to have a sound energy policy that reduces dependence on imported oil that does not include an honest and strong commitment to nuclear power and clean coal, and I think the Republican Party really is the party that not only supports development of alternative energies, but recognizes that as you go through what is a multi-decade transition to those alternatives, you have to make good and prudent and constructive use of the basic sources that we have depended on. I find it amusing to listen to the Democrats try to rationalize their multi-decade battle against nuclear power in New Hampshire.... The only thing that has maintained an environmentally sound supply of energy at an economic level, both for the state of New Hampshire with Seabrook and New England with its nuclear power in this country, has been nuclear power. And if the Democrats had had their way, we’d probably be looking at 50 cents per kilowatt hour of electricity now. All the fantasy sources that they were talking about then never came through. They had grand visions of unlimited hydro-power, hydropower-generated electricity coming from Canada, and Canada can’t even get that hydropower-generated electricity. So the Democrats have always — on energy policy — had fantasy visions and I think today they have fantasy visions because they are not including everything. They are only including their favorite few and that’s a serious mistake. And I think young people today are smart enough to understand that.

Democrats seemed to have a coherent message across the board, and what I’m wondering, regardless of what the message is, [is] how are you going to have that Republican message be coherent here in New Hampshire?
Well, I think some of the problems Republicans had politically in the last election was a reflection of problems voters had across the country with what was going on in Washington. And in addition to that, I’m not sure that our presidential candidate, John McCain, ever crafted a message that resonated here in New Hampshire. So that was a big part, in my opinion, that was a big part of what happened politically. We did have problems within the state and we didn’t differentiate ourselves against the Democrats. The Democrats took the pledge and made people think they were committed to fiscal discipline, but in fact they have broken the pledge because there is an implicit part of the pledge that is a promise to govern wisely and efficiently and to spend within your means and within the level of state revenues that are available. And they have not done that. So I think Republicans can point out that failure, address how we can move forward with our philosophy to restore that balance and talk to voters about that. I think when voters look around at their cities and towns being shortchanged by the state government. In Manchester I think there was a serious problem with the rooms and meals taxes — benefits that the state by law is required to send here. If I remember the numbers correctly, I think Manchester has obligations on the rooms and meals distributions from the state, the state has to return to Manchester something over $4 million. I think Nashua was expecting something over $3 million. And those are serious failures on the part of the state. I think voters are not going to be happy with that and I think the ear of the voter will be a lot more open to the Republican message when they see that the Democratic failures are pinching their pocketbooks.

Onward to 2010
I asked Sununu where the state party’s priorities would lie in the 2010 election, as far as which races he was targeting. He didn’t offer many specifics, but he remained confident in Republicans’ chances.

When you think about 2010, there are a number of races; is there a particular race, the governor’s office, the Statehouse...
No, we are truly targeting them all. The Senate race, Sen. Gregg has said he’s not running again, so the Senate race is an open Senate race. The two congressional races, the governor’s office, the state House of Representatives, the state Senate and the Executive Council.

When you think about Democrats, who is beatable?
Well, I think they’re all beatable. I think they’re all beatable. And you want to know something, they know it.

Sununu stuck to his guns Tuesday when I asked him again about particularly vulnerable Democrats.

Do you see any particular Democrats who are vulnerable in 2010?
All of them. They all carry the burden of bad governance.

I wanted to get Sununu’s thoughts Friday on Sen. Gregg and his about-face on taking Obama’s offer to be Commerce Secretary.

Tell me what your thoughts are as far as Sen. Gregg. He was going to be the Commerce Secretary and now he isn’t, and now he’s not running either...
Sen. Gregg, I think, has 33 years of public service in the state of New Hampshire and at some point you’ve earned the right to go back and enjoy some quiet time with your family, and I think he’s more than earned that right. I, first of all, thank him for those years of service. I applaud the great success he’s had in being a great governor and a great congressman and a great senator for the state. And it’s a big loss, but he certainly deserves a chance to go out and enjoy life without carrying the burdens of being a publicly visible official.

State politics
The state is facing a massive budget deficit in the next two fiscal years; it’s estimated to be more than $500 million. Democrats seem to say the deficit has been caused by a revenue problem, while Republicans point at overspending. I asked Sununu to touch on the state budget and how politics have evolved in New Hampshire.

What are your thoughts on the state budget? Obviously we know there’s a big deficit.
You know, when the governor came out with his budget, I tried to be as constructive as I could, and I commended him for, when he said that there was no increase in spending, I commended him for that. But now I feel kind of foolish because when you go through the details there’s a lot of increase in spending. They’ve just relabeled it with a smoke and mirrors strategy, which I think is really unfair to the citizens of the state of New Hampshire. So I’m very disappointed. They have shifted funds from the traditional operating budget to a bonding ... and they call that a reduction in spending. That’s not a reduction in spending; that’s like paying a credit card with a credit card. They have stiffed the cities and towns $167 million and want to take a reduction for that by saying they hope the cities and towns will get some bailout money. There is an accounting gimmick that they’re using to take some of the expenses traditionally associated with the liquor commission off the budget and they say that’s a reduction in spending, but it’s still there. And so, this really is a slightly disingenuous budget on the spending side. On the revenue side, it’s even worse. The cornerstone of dealing with the revenue side is to pray for bailout money ... not recognizing that there’s no such thing as a free lunch. And even the bailout money is going to come with strings attached and create problems for future budgets. In addition to that, they’re trying to tap a privately owned fund, the malpractice fund, which by current law is owned by the doctors that paid the premiums into it. And they would like to take $110 million out of that fund. I really do think those approaches are not very sound fiscally. The fact that they are raising the room and meals tax is going to create a problem for New Hampshire’s most important industry, the tourist industry. That too, is just not good governing, not good management. They got themselves in this problem because they created spending momentum in the past and now they’re paying the penalty. And the worst thing about this budget is that both on the spending side and the revenue side, they’re creating major problems for future budgets.

Most of the other states are having similar budget issues, some much worse than New Hampshire, so in that sense...
They’re not having much worse than New Hampshire. If you go to the National Council of State Legislatures Web site, the latest data they had that I saw was last November and only one state had an anticipated deficit of greater than 15 percent and that was New Hampshire. So amongst the states that were having trouble then, we were 50th. We have, I think, taken some steps to cut the spending, which is a good thing to do. But we traditionally were doing better than other states, would have been doing better than other states, but this time around, we’re not clustered at the top, we’re clustered well below average.

[Thinking about political tone,] what do you think about your time when you were governor and when you were chief of staff at the White House? Is the tone different now?
Well, to tell you the truth, I’d like to get the tone back to where it was. I think one of the reasons that Democrats think they have succeeded in the last few cycles is that they have practiced what I call the politics of personal destruction. They attack the individual rather than the issue. Even now, and I’ve got a thick enough hide so it doesn’t bother me, but whenever I raise any of these specific issues with budgets or legislation, invariably, somebody from the Democratic state committee says well don’t pay any attention to him, he’s old. I may be old, but there’s a lot of people who think that I’m a little bit old and a little bit wise. And this attitude, which unfortunately ... the governor has tolerated in his Democratic state committee, is really a deterioration of one of the things that used to be nice about New Hampshire. We used to be able to disagree quite reasonably.

When you think about the way [state] politicians work together, whether it’s the state Senate or the House or the Governor working with either of those bodies, do you think that’s different now then it was, say when you were governor?
Well, I think, right now the Democrats’ definition of bipartisanship is to do it their way and put your name on the bill, instead of sitting down and talking issues out and trying to get more than just the Democratic viewpoint built into legislation. So I think bipartisanship by their definition is anything but bipartisanship.

[Considering the Internet’s role in information distribution,] are voters more educated now than they were 10, 15, 20 years ago?
You know there’s a big difference between more data and more information and more education. I really do think in a real sense, there may be a lot more data more easily available to people, but I’m not sure they’re digesting it and assimilating it very effectively. Part of my job in this new position is to help package that in a way that’s easily digestible and talk about it in a way that explains to people what that flood of numbers they can get access to on the computer really means.

Looking back
Along with serving as governor and chief of staff, Sununu is a mechanical engineer, who received his Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the co-host of CNN’s Crossfire from 1992 to 1998. He was the president of JHS Engineering Company and Thermal Research, Inc. from 1963 to 1983 and he was the chief engineer at Astro Dynamics from 1960 to 1965. He was also an associate dean of engineering at Tufts University from 1968 to 1973. In 1987, Sununu served as the chairman of the National Governors Association.

Thinking about your political career, how did you get into politics in the first place?
God only knows. I was an engineer, teaching at Tufts, had an engineering consulting business. Decided I’d like to come back and run for the U.S. Senate and ran in a primary in ’80 in a very crowded field with a former governor, former attorney general and some other very significant state officials in it, and ended up running second to Warren Rudman in the primary. Helped Warren get elected and I thought that was my — after I lost the primary, I took the role of chairman of Warren’s campaign and helped him get elected — and I thought that was my big fling in politics. But two years later, the party came and asked me to run for governor against the incumbent Democrat, and I thought I’d do the party a favor and perhaps be the sacrificial lamb but ended up winning, so I had to quickly tidy up my personal businesses and go serve as governor for three terms. Then in 1988 I helped run the Bush campaign in New Hampshire and got involved in the national campaign. And President Bush, 41, George Herbert Walker Bush, asked me to come down and be chief of staff. Since the half life of chief of staffs in those days used to be measured in like six months, I thought it was going to be a short tenure, but I ended up serving a little over three years.

What’s that position like? What’s it like on a daily basis?
Well, the first thing that I tell people about it is, it’s whatever the president wants it to be. So it could be different for each president. It was great. I worked for a great president who was easy to work for, that knew what he was doing, that understood foreign policy, understood domestic issues. We were there at a time when the Soviet Union was collapsing. And so I got to be chief of staff watching the Berlin Wall come down, watching the Soviet Union disintegrate, watching the way the world did things change dramatically. And you know, on a daily basis, it’s a lot of work. I usually started leaving the house at 5:30 in the morning and got home at about 11 at night. But it was fun and very gratifying. And I feel I worked for a president that history is going to treat very well.

When you look back on your career, you played such a variety of roles. When were you having the most fun?
You know, that’s a very hard question to answer. It’s like saying which of your children do you love the most. You love them all in different ways. And so that’s my honest answer about all of that. I’ve loved every thing I’ve done. I’ve never had to do anything I don’t enjoy doing and it’s been a tremendously fortunate thing for me.

Thinking about your background in engineering, do you think that helps you have a little different view of politics?
Absolutely. Engineers solve problems. There’s too many lawyers in politics, they cause problems. But engineers are good problem-solvers. They know how to break a problem down into pieces, put the solutions to the pieces back together again and come up with a net positive result. So I really wish there were more engineers, technically-educated people in politics, because a great deal of our problems do have a technical basis, issues of the environment, energy, transportation, even national security issues, the weapons issues have a great component of technology in them.

What was it like being the host of Crossfire? That seems like a bit of a departure.
Yeah, you know, as I was leaving the White House, they called me from CNN and said would I be interested in doing Crossfire and I said, “Absolutely not.” They said, “Well, come over and talk.” And I went over and it intrigued me so I agreed to do a couple weeks for a trial and I really enjoyed it. It allowed me to be as irresponsible as I wanted on television. And so I did that for six years, basically alternate weeks for six years. And I really enjoyed it. I got to learn a little bit about the media process from the inside. I got to see all those things we Republicans complain about the liberal media are true, but had a good chance to see something that I never really expected to be a part of. And I enjoyed it. I enjoyed Michael Kinsley on the other side and Geraldine Ferraro on the other side. And Bill Press on the other side. They were good people to work against in a sense of working with them. They were on the wrong side of issues and of course they were always wrong. But it was fun working them. And all three of them, we remain close friends, so it was great.

Thinking back on your career...what are some of the accomplishments that you are particularly proud of?
Well, I think having eight great children is probably the biggest single accomplishment. Eight children that I’m extremely proud of, and one of whom at least I hope will clean my chin when I’m 85. But really, my family is really what I think is both my most important and the accomplishment I’m the proudest of. But beyond that, I love being an engineer, and I feel I’ve made some contributions there. I loved being governor. I think I brought some great results to the state. I took over when they were having a terrible financial crisis. Not only did we address things in a way that solved the crisis, but I was able, because they were fairly good times, to rebuild virtually all the institutional facilities in the state, new state hospital, new addition to the prison, put together a 10-year highway plan, which was maintained after I left, turned the accounting system in the state to a generally accepted accounting principles basis...which is much more rigorous and stringent than it had been before I got there. Redid the mental health system. Before we knew the word “privatize,” we privatized many of the services with tremendous improvement. Dartmouth Medical School, I was able to convince Dartmouth Medical School to take over the psychiatric services, which I think raised tremendously the quality of psychiatric assistance available in the state. So I think those are the kinds of things that I really look back on as an achievement. As chief of staff, I had the opportunity to run a White House in an extremely transitional time, when the world was watching the Soviet Union collapse, when the Berlin Wall was coming down, when we passed the Clean Air Act, when we passed the Civil Rights Bill, and reformed a lot of the processes in government. It was a good time. We had to deal with a fiscal crisis then, the savings and loans crisis. I think we grabbed it immediately on coming into office, as the president said, “I’d like it fixed and fixed fast.” And I think we did fix it fast. As we see how difficult this crisis is to deal with, it looks, what we did then, looks better and better all the time.

A national view
Given the recession facing the entire country, I asked Sununu to talk about President Obama and what he’s done so far.

What are your thoughts on the current administration? President Obama hasn’t been in office all that long, but what do you think about his initial days?
Well, you know on inauguration day, everybody was cheering for him, hoping that he would be able to fulfill the commitments he made. Unfortunately, everything that has happened in the last month or so looks like it’s business as usual on the Democratic side. We had a piece of legislation with almost 9,000 earmarks in it, business as usual. The stimulus bill had all kinds of special programs that the Democrats had never been able to get passed and would never be able to get passed even with this current majority, unless it rode the back of an emergency piece of legislation. That’s not very good governing. That’s not very good policy. That’s not even very good politics in the long run. So I think so far, it’s been very disappointing and I was really hoping he’d be able to do well. Frankly, the country needs him to do well. Every citizen in this country, at the moment of his raising his hand and taking the oath, was hoping he would do well. And I think it’s gone downhill since then.

What were your thoughts with the administration’s initial days in terms of bipartisanship?
Well, I think they had the same problem with bipartisanship that I explained about the bipartisanship here in New Hampshire. Their version of bipartisanship is “Here’s our Democratic legislation, do you want to sign on?” instead of sitting down and working out details and examining options with Republicans and Democrats at the table and give and take and alternatives. And I think that’s been a big disappointment. I think of the total of all the Republicans in the House and the Senate they only managed to get three votes.