New Hampshire: Decision, 2008

As part of our guest blogger series, IBP is honored to present Claude Augern, for years the host of NBC's popular Sunday Morning show, "Augern's America". As he did for over twenty years on his talk show, Augern will be seeking the amusing, unsual and eccentric characters that flit around the edges of important American events.

Here in Nashua, New Hampshire, resting on the stump of all that remains of a once mighty maple tree is Hugh Farlin. Nodding a connivial, "How'se ya doin'?" at passing New Hampshirites, Mr. Farlin considers himself the biggest Mitt Romney supporter in the United States.

Now, Mr. Farlin, knows nothing about Mr. Romney's position on the issues of the day and five will get you ten that he might not even be able to pick the former Massachusetts' Governor out of a police line-up. The candidate potentially holds out the possiblity of accomplishing a far more important objective for Hugh Farlin, outside the realm of petty politics.

Mitt Romney can help Hugh Farlin re-capture the most transcendent moment of his youth.

For it was at the Democratic National Convention in 1976 at Madison Square Garden that Hugh Farlin climbed the mountaintop. For younger readers, it may be instructive to point out that network television was a more genteel place, free of the depredations so common to today's viewing public. On the final day of that Convention, as the Democrat nominees for President and Vice-President, Jimmy Carter and Walter "Fritz" Mondale, appeared on stage, hands clasped and arms raised, the convention floor a roiling scene of pandemonium, a younger, spry Hugh Farlin waited patiently for an ABC producer to point the camera in his direction. Waiting for the optimum moment when the camera's red eye blinked in his direction, Hugh Farlin stood bolt upright and held aloft a sign for the nation to read, which read: "Grits and Fritz give me the sh**s."

It has been thirty-two years since that moment. At long last, Hugh Farlin has found another candidate whose name fits into a convenient rhyming meter with the common euphemism for feces. And thus here, under a darkening sky in Nashua, New Hampshire, Hugh Farlin sits and waits for the arrival of Mitt Romney.