Kathy Kiely

Don't feel badly, New Hampshire primary losers. No messaging tweaks, get-out-the-vote tricks or advertising blitzes would have helped. The Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders victories were more than 30 years in the making. In fact, I’m pretty sure I can pinpoint when it all began.

It was sometime in the early 1980s. I was standing in line for a pay phone (yes, we are talking a lo-o-ong time ago) at the end of a dingy corridor of a Civil War-era building in downtown Washington. At the time, it was headquarters for the International Trade Commission. A reporter for The Pittsburgh Press, I was waiting to call in a story about the latest complaint local steel makers had filed against their foreign competitors. On the phone ahead of me was a lawyer — an American — for one of those foreign competitors. As I composed sentences in my head about the arguments he had delivered against American manufacturers’ “high labor costs,” he was phoning in a lunch reservation at The Palm, one of Washington’s swankiest steakhouses.

Excuse this reporter for venturing an opinion, but I think it's a pretty safe bet that filet-eating lawyers who earn their Cabernet by making the case that American blue-collar workers are overpaid are just the sort of Washington establishment types Granite Staters had in mind when they punched (a word used quite advisedly) their ballots for Sanders and Trump. That economic anxiety once experienced by the tens of thousands of manufacturing workers who lost their jobs in the global shifts that created the Rust Bowl? It has now gone viral.

It's notable that on the eve of this year's primary, New Hampshire voters identified opioid addiction, a problem no longer associated with inner city kids but with anxious, displaced whites, as their top concern. Ever since it delivered a psychological victory by giving an unexpectedly strong finish to Eugene McCarthy against incumbent President Lyndon Johnson in 1968, thereby delivering the first ballot-box expression of Americans’ angst over the Vietnam War, New Hampshire’s primary has been something of a political canary in the nation’s mine shaft.

Moreover, the state whose hulking textile mills are now home to countless service industries, from restaurants to campaign headquarters, has been telegraphing the same message for some time about economic concerns. As others have pointed out, another insurgent Republican with a message markedly similar to Trump’s (Remember “peasants with pitchforks”?) also won favor with New Hampshire voters. The underfunded Pat Buchanan — a TV commentator and onetime White House aide — got 37% of the vote against incumbent President George H.W. Bush in the 1992 Republican primary, and he won it in 1996.

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Or consider another Trump sound-alike: Ross Perot. Running as an independent, the Texas businessman was never on the ballot for one of New Hampshire's fabled first-in-the-nation primaries. But in his 1996 general election run against President Bill Clinton and Sen. Bob Dole, Perot picked up nearly 10% of the New Hampshire vote.

In ways sometimes very different and sometimes strikingly the same, Trump and Sanders have responded to the unease resulting from the global changes that have swept the U.S. economy — whether they are talking about the trade deals they both criticize, the illegal immigration that Trump has vowed to stop, or the income disparity that Sanders has made his signature issue. It’s also probably no accident that, in very different ways, both are expressions of nostalgia: Trump for the brash hucksterism of 1950s Mad Men, and Sanders for the say-you-want-a-revolution anti-establishmentarianism of the 1960s.

That’s probably part of the reason for their success. When politicians talk about American exceptionalism, what they're really tapping into is a yearning for that era when things were more secure; a post-World War II America, insulated from old world conflicts by two oceans and elevated above the rest of the world economically — not so much because our workers, our factories and the people who led them were "the greatest," but because the rest of the developed world had been blown to smithereens.

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Today, partly because of technology developed here, we are within reach not only of other voices but also of other conflicts. In large part because of the generosity we showed after World War II, rebuilding the industrialized world and helping to sow the seeds of democracy and entrepreneurialism, we have more competition from overseas — whether it’s for our jobs or for the seats our kids covet in top universities. And we’ve benefited from cheap imports: Those bargains Americans love to snap up in big box stores are, by and large, not made in the USA.

These are messages no politician wants to deliver. Hard truths can’t be softened with promises to make America great again or to occupy Wall Street into submission. Making history requires more than slogans.

As the presidential campaign moves into South Carolina, a state that has suffered through the exodus of its textile industry, and Nevada, the capital of the past decade’s foreclosure crisis, will politicians have the courage to deliver those truths? And as the campaign moves out of the cozy confines of Iowa and New Hampshire — out of living rooms and high school gyms and onto airport tarmacs and the Internet and TV airwaves — will voters have the patience to listen?

Kathy Kiely, a former USA TODAY reporter who most recently was Washington news director for Bloomberg Politics, teaches and practices journalism in Washington. Follow her on Twitter @kathykiely.

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