NATIONAL

For gay N.H. lawmaker, Obama was clear choice
Voters finally get their say after long slog in the snow

LISA KEEN
Friday, January 11, 2008

HART’S LOCATION, N.H. — When Ed Butler recently invited several neighbors to “the Met,” he was not playing into a gay male stereotype. He was campaigning for Barack Obama.

Butler, a New Hampshire state representative, is gay. And he’s one of those newcomers to politics who surfed into office on the Democratic tidal wave of November 2006. He’s also a 58-year-old innkeeper in the north country of New Hampshire with his life partner. And together they are two of the 29 registered voters in the state’s smallest town.

The Met is a coffeehouse in the center of nearby North Conway Village, where Michelle Obama, the wife of the candidate, was to appear in just a couple of days.

On Saturday, just hours after having to take his 9-year-old Bernese Mountain Dog, Abby, to the vet to have her euthanized, Butler hit the campaign trail for Obama. It was two days past the Iowa caucuses and three days before the nation’s first presidential primary of 2008. Obama had won Iowa, taking 38 percent of the delegates at the caucuses. The polls were showing a close race between Obama and Hillary Clinton.

Going door to door, Butler found only one neighbor who said she was undecided. Everybody else had taken sides — for Clinton, Obama and John Edwards. A list of registered voters showed the undecided woman had registered with no party affiliation. Butler talked up all the Democrats, but emphasized Obama, then asked the woman how she thought she might vote Tuesday.

“I kinda like Rudy,” she said. “And Mitt Romney.”

This is heavily Republican territory, Butler acknowledged as he continued down a long road.

“Can I talk to you about Obama?” he asks a man shoveling snow from a driveway where it has piled more than five feet high.

“No,” says the man, “but he’s a great candidate.”

As Butler walks on, a woman at the house runs out, calling “You can talk to me!” Butler does, and she directs him across the street to another potential supporter. But at that next door, the man says he’s for Clinton.

But for Butler, Obama is the right candidate. He’s seen Edwards on the campaign trail and thought he was insincere and playing only to the cameras. He doesn’t like Clinton, Butler said, because he doesn’t like monarchies. He met Obama last May and was struck by his sense that Obama was seemed trustworthy and sincere. And, as a former nurse who worked with people with AIDS in New York City in the 1980s, he thinks Obama has a good health plan.

But gay issues were also critical. And Obama, he noted, was willing to repeal the entire Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), not just one section of it, like Clinton. Plus, said Butler, Obama has an “intimate understanding” of discrimination.

Butler acknowledged that the Obama campaign’s inclusion of anti-gay gospel singer Donnie McClurkin in a concert tour in South Carolina was a “mistake,” but he felt Obama did a good job in responding and trying to help both the gay and the black community work through it.

Not every gay person in New Hampshire agrees, of course. The state’s Freedom to Marry group endorsed Edwards. State Rep. Jim Splaine, who led last year’s successful legislative push for civil unions, is backing Clinton. In making phone calls Saturday, Butler found gay voters for each of the top three polling Democrats, plus long-shot Dennis Kucinich.

In the local sports bar-deli market, an undecided voter said she wasn’t comfortable yet with Obama’s spouse Michelle. Clinton’s spouse, former President Bill Clinton, and Edwards’ spouse, Elizabeth Edwards, seemed like clear assets, she said.

“But “I’m not sure about his wife, with two little girls,” said the woman.

Butler urged the voter to attend an event with Michelle Obama Monday at the Met, adding, “Obama is somebody I can respect and trust.”

And that’s why, on an icy cold gray Saturday in New Hampshire, Butler was going door to door to encourage voters to support Obama. At three minutes past midnight on Tuesday, when voters of Hart’s Location joined voters in another small town, Dixville, as the first to finish casting their votes in the state’s primary, Hart’s location gave nine votes to Obama, six to John McCain, five to Mike Huckabee, four to Ron Paul, three to Clinton and one each to Mitt Romney and John Edwards.

“It was an exciting vote,” said Butler, “and a great outcome.”

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