In a speech on the floor of the US Senate, the two-term Republican confirmed that he is bolting the Grand Old Party to run for president as an independent. It is amazing enough that a man who barely survived a reelection challenge two years ago sees himself as presidential timber. But it is positively astounding that he thinks he can succeed by abandoning the party that helped him hang onto his seat by his fingernails. The Granite State's motto is still ''Live Free or Die,'' but gun control, abortion, and taxes are as divisive in New Hampshire as they are in the rest of the country. The New Hampshire of hard-line conservatives, homogeneous small towns, and Republican domination has gone the way of the textile and shoe industries.
Newcomers outnumber natives.
The state's southern tier looks less like a bucolic Currier and Ives scene than the Route 128 belt around Boston. In matters political as well as economic the line between New Hampshire and Massachusetts is growing ever more blurry. Senator Edward M. Kennedy might be the image of politically liberal Massachusetts, but Governor William Weld was the more recent reality. New Hampshire Governor Mel Thomson was certainly a classic conservative, but the incumbent is not only a woman and a progressive, she's a Democrat who is able to say the words ''broad-based tax'' without flinching. It is true that fewer than 8,000 of the state's 1.1 million residents are black, but a more liberal social climate is evidenced by the decision of lawmakers in May to make New Hampshire the last state in the union to finally recognize the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a state holiday.