Most damaging were the comments that he was just not “presidential material”.Mr Bush was also judged to have patronised New Hampshire voters last week when he tried to make his tax plan comprehensible. “When are you going to get back to China and Taiwan?” she shouted. To which he snapped back: “I’m getting to it,” eliciting a further objection before he abruptly switched back to China. Departing parents voiced worries that Mr Bush had been “winging it” and would have to “find more substance than that”. There was chattering in the back rows and none of the rapt silence that attends the appearances of Mr McCain, or the most oratorically mesmerising of the Republican candidates, Alan Keyes.In the question and answer session, Mr Bush was taken to task by one questioner when he digressed into a treatise on the virtues of free trade instead of answering her enquiry about China and Taiwan. Here, in the 20-minute version of the same speech, Mr Bush pressed all the right buttons – morality, school standards and safety, tax cuts for poor and for rich – but that also fell flat.
The ovation was patchy and Mr Bush and his Texan-size retinue departed without waiting to hear his rivals.Something similar had happened the previous day with a quite different audience – “soccer moms” (and dads) in the wealthy town of Amherst. Second to speak to this audience of party stalwarts, Mr Bush struggled with his suffering voice but made a competent job of the 10-minute version of his standard stump speech, with its high-flown calls for the American dream to “touch every willing heart”, for “no child to be left behind” and his warning that prosperity without purpose is “materialism”.Yet the speech fell flat. He carries with him the hopes of a party hierarchy that has staked its all on the belief that he can win back the White House – and so he may.There is just a whiff in the air, though, that New Hampshire’s Republican voters may be spoiling for an upset.On Friday night, Mr Bush and three of his rivals addressed the Rockingham County Republicans’ dinner commemorating Abraham Lincoln. New Hampshirites, he maintains, are a politically experienced and discerning bunch and they take their four-yearly “first-in-the-nation” responsibility seriously. “They’re gonna say, wait a minute, I’m gonna look around,” said a local columnist of the Republican Party’s juggernaut effort on Mr Bush’s behalf.Mr Bush, gilded son of a former President, is the candidate of the party establishment. But forecasts are complicated by the tendency of New Hampshirites, according to local reporters, to lie to pollsters, even after they have voted; in part out of general stroppiness, in part for fear of small-town neighbours getting to know how they voted: “You get into feuds that way.”Dick Bennett of the locally-based American Research Group, says many voters have genuinely not made up their minds and may not do so until the day before the poll. But somehow it is not working: Mr Bush is not going down as well in New Hampshire as he has done elsewhere.The latest opinion polls show him running a dead heat with Senator John McCain of Arizona, the Vietnam war hero and straight talker who has meandered in and out of the lead in New Hampshire.But Mr Bush reached this point only by dint of some intensive and ingratiating campaigning at the end of last year, after starting off on the wrong foot.Eschewing the early New Hampshire campaigning and the first televised debates, he found himself reproached as, at once, “chicken” and “arrogant”.Now, the polls show Mr McCain on a slight downswing, and Mr Bush on an equally slight upswing.
The air of broad plains, conspicuous wealth and sheer Texan “bigness” he brings with him, is not mixing well with that of the mountains, forests and sheer “smallness” of New Hampshire.The independence-oriented people of the Lone Star state might have been expected to mingle easily with the strong-willed non-conformists of New Hampshire, whose state motto, “Live Free or Die”, adorns each car licence plate. It is two days before voting begins in what is billed as the “first-in-the-nation” New Hampshire primary, and the candidates have already grown hoarse: Republican or Democrat, voice-fatigue is no respecter of party allegiance.
Perhaps the worst afflicted, though, is George W Bush, the comfortable victor in last week’s Iowa Republican caucuses and poll-leader nationwide, who is rasping his way through a dawn to dusk programme of speaking engagements, literally running for his party’s presidential nomination.But the governor of Texas has run into a spot of local difficulty in this singular north-eastern state. It is two days before voting begins in what is billed as the “first-in-the-nation” New Hampshire primary, and the candidates have already grown hoarse: Republican or Democrat, voice-fatigue is no respecter of party allegiance. “Knowing his insecurities, I think he might not have liked me doing well That was one of his problems.”. Many later blamed her for the break-up of the Beatles a year after their 1969 wedding.Since Lennon’s death, she has lived a quiet life in New York where she is notably absent from much of the city’s hectic social life.She has always fiercely protected his musical name while continuing to forge her own artistic career. She exhibited in Britain for the first time in a decade in Oxford in 1997, with a show which then toured to Scotland and Ireland.Both Sean and Julian Lennon have followed their father into pop music, Sean with an avant-garde band whose reputation has been muted, Julian with some chart success.In August 1998, Sean said he feared fans would hinder his musical plans: “Basically, I’m trying to get rid of all the Beatles fans, because I think they’re going to destroy my career.”Last year, Julian admitted he thought his father would have resented his own music if he had lived. But she angrily denied any argument yesterday and told The Independent on Sunday: “Contrary to what has been said in the British press, Julian, Sean and I have had no discussion yet about the possible parole of Chapman, and therefore there has been no feud among us regarding our views on the subject.”The issue would be resolved by the legal process and she did not want to make any “untimely statement” that would get in the way of that process, she said “I am not being silent or indecisive.
