Newt Gingrich may not have much money to spend on advertising here. But he does have Joseph W. McQuaid, the publisher of New Hampshire’s largest newspaper, The Union Leader. And Mr. McQuaid will happily spill barrel after barrel of ink trying to tear every other candidate down.
“Our job is to say, ‘Here’s our guy. Here’s why he’s the best, and why all the others are the worst,’ ” Mr. McQuaid said in a recent interview. He had just finished a front-page editorial for Sunday’s paper that ripped into Mitt Romney, who leads Mr. Gingrich by double digits in the polls. “Romney may be the WORST candidate,” he wrote.
“There’s no reason to be subtle,” Mr. McQuaid said.
Subtle is not how many people would describe The Union Leader or Mr. McQuaid. Mr. Romney is “plastic” and “desperate,” he said. Ron Paul is a dangerous elf from the “Island of Misfit Toys.” And Rick Santorum? “Is he running for something?” Mr. McQuaid said, flashing an impish grin.
Mr. McQuaid and his newspaper are the Siberian tigers of political journalism: ferocious and endangered. At a time when editorials and newspapers themselves are playing a smaller role in American politics, the brash and biting Union Leader still commands the attention and respect of the country’s most prominent politicians. Every four years, they flatter and pay homage to the newspaper in hope that they can secure what remains one of the most coveted endorsements of the presidential election.
Mr. Romney made a trip to the paper’s Santa Fund charity luncheon in November. An article in The Union Leader said that he even took a pledge envelope.
Jon M. Huntsman Jr. has been known to stop by the newspaper’s offices unannounced.
“He’d drop in, and he’d pull up a chair and park for a half-hour,” Mr. McQuaid said, sounding as if he had been at this game too long to be flattered anymore. “It’s, like, O.K.”
Mr. Gingrich’s wooing of the paper stretched out for almost a year. He would send Mr. McQuaid the novels he has written, drop by the offices to chat about Churchill and the 1860 presidential election (Mr. Gingrich and the publisher are both American history buffs) and e-mail an occasional article.
“I got Callista to autograph him a children’s book for his grandchildren,” Mr. Gingrich said of his wife at a recent campaign stop in the town of Lebanon. “And he reads my novels.”
In Mr. McQuaid’s office, a cluttered table was filled with books written by presidential aspirants, all of whom either had sent them by mail or had dropped them off in person.
“Read his novels?” Mr. McQuaid said of Mr. Gingrich, digging through the pile. “That would be a stretch.”
People have feared and loathed The Union Leader ever since the days of the curmudgeonly William Loeb III, who bought the paper in the 1940s and bullied a generation of politicians with vitriolic front-page editorials. Mr. Loeb headlined an article about Henry A. Kissinger’s appointment as secretary of state with an anti-Semitic slur. Edmund S. Muskie became “Moscow Muskie” and a flip-flopper. Mr. Muskie destroyed his candidacy by breaking down and appearing to cry while denouncing Mr. Loeb at a news conference outside the paper’s offices.
Mr. McQuaid, who has a wry sense of humor, neatly combed brown hair and a lean frame, seems committed to carrying on the paper’s legacy as a political baseball bat, albeit in an inoffensive, less cruel way. He prefers to bury you with words.
Friday’s newspaper, for example, had a front-page article about Mr. Gingrich, a syndicated column titled “In Mass., Romney raised taxes, fees” and an op-ed article, “Newt Gingrich can rise to the challenge of the times,” by a New Hampshire state representative. The back page displayed a picture of Mr. Gingrich and his wife, who was proudly holding a copy of The Union Leader.
“Joe McQuaid says, We don’t just endorse once; we endorse every day,” said John H. Sununu, the former New Hampshire governor, who sometimes found himself attacked when Mr. McQuaid believed his administration was not sufficiently conservative. “Once they endorse, every day after, you will not be in doubt about who they endorsed.”
The newspaper has at times gone over the top in protecting Mr. Gingrich. Last month it published an anonymous quote defending Mr. Gingrich’s tax position — which had come under fire from Mr. Sununu and other Republicans — and attributed it to a Gingrich aide. It turned out the “aide” was Mr. Gingrich himself.
Mr. McQuaid, who edited the paper before he became publisher more than a decade ago, defended his newsroom and said he did not meddle in coverage.
“My reporters bend over backwards to be fair,” he said.
But some people object to the notion that he is hands off. “He is a very active publisher,” said Mark Hayward, a general-assignment reporter. “I don’t think he ever left the newsroom, in the emotional sense.”
Though the newspaper’s weekday circulation is just over 45,000 copies, its political potency is admired even by those who have ended up on the wrong side of the publisher’s pen.
The newspaper’s advocacy of Mr. Gingrich came up on Friday in a Fox News interview with Kelly A. Ayotte, the state’s freshman Republican senator.
“It’s the only statewide newspaper,” Ms. Ayotte said. “It’s a conservative newspaper. I respect The Union Leader.”
She also noted, “I have to say, they weighed in against me in my primary, and I still ended up winning.”
The newspaper’s average in picking winners suggests that Mr. Gingrich should not start writing his victory speech just yet. Though it endorsed Ronald Reagan in 1980 and John McCain in 2008, Steve Forbes got the newspaper’s nod in 2000, and Pat Buchanan in 1992. Americans never got to see a President Pierre du Pont (endorsed in 1988) or a President Samuel Yorty (1972).
“I’m only one voice,” Mr. McQuaid acknowledged, adding, “a loud voice.”
(Via New York Times: Politics)
