ONCORD, N.H. - On a day when politicians and pork producers from Derry to Des Moines were wrangling over New Hampshire's moving its presidential primary ahead by a week, the man at the center of the tempest fingered a 200-year-old newspaper.
William Gardner, New Hampshire's secretary of state since 1976, Thursday perused a remarkably well-preserved copy of the Oct. 8, 1799, ''Massachusetts Mercury,'' with ads from merchants selling goods off British ships, a notice promising a reward for capture of a runaway slave woman and her 12-year-old son, and Paul Revere's notice, as Boston's first sewer commissioner, that all privvies had to be shoveled out during October. (That must have been the first Big Dig.)
Henry Fredette, a collector of historical artifacts from Fitchburg, had delivered the paper to Gardner, a bit of a historian in his own right.
Bill Gardner is a man who takes the long view. A Democrat who's become a local institution here, reelected regularly by the Republican-dominated 400-member House of Representatives, it is Gardner who is entrusted to keep New Hampshire first, if not in the eyes of Iowa pols, then at least on the calendar of presidential primaries.
By moving the date of New Hampshire's first-in-the-nation primary from a penciled-in-but-unofficial Feb. 8 to an etched-in-Granite-State-granite Feb. 1, the low-key Gardner recently ignited a firestorm in Iowa. The move means that if Iowa wants to keep eight days of separation between its caucuses and New Hampshire's new Feb. 1 date, it will have to move up its Jan. 31 date. Otherwise, there'll be just three hours between when Iowa stops voting and New Hampshire starts at Dixville Notch.
But Iowa is not so inclined to switch. It seems that the pork producers of the nation have reserved hundreds of hotel rooms in the Hawkeye State to chew the, er, pork, roast the ribs, and otherwise wallow in hog-producer heaven. And the moving-up-a-week schedule shift affects thousands of caucus sites, church halls, school gyms, etc., with disruption of plans on a vast scale.
The shrieks and caterwauling reached such a pitch that Governor Tom Vilsack called New Hampshire Governor Jeanne Shaheen to demand she bring Gardner to heel. Some New Hampshire legislators began harrumphing about calling a special session to strip Gardner of the power to set the primary date, a power he has exercised deftly since 1976. On CNN, anchor Bernie Shaw grilled Gardner, who explained how his hand was forced by Delaware's moving its primary forward, triggering the portion of the New Hampshire law decreeing New Hampshire votes at least a week before any other state's primary.
After several days of threats, bluff, elbow-tossing, and venting, cooler heads prevailed, New Hampshire politicians cooled their jets, sanity reemerged, and Gardner's date stood. Some Iowans remain miffed; people who resent New Hampshire's gatekeeper role continue to mutter darkly in other states, but the Old Man of the Mountain remains the starter of the presidential primary calendar.
''Our secretary of state did just what he was supposed to do,'' said Lou D'Allesandro, a Democrat from Manchester and the state Senate's majority whip. ''I taught Billy in the ninth and 10th grades at Bishop Bradley High School in Manchester, and he knows what he's doing.''
There is not much sympathy in New Hampshire for Iowa's discomfiture. ''They had their auction, their little tent sale,'' said D'Allesandro, making sarcastic reference to the straw poll this summerin Ames, where the Republican candidates dropped between $100 and $300 for every straw poll voter they snared.
Shaheen seemed to waffle last week under Iowa's umbrage. But after she took a quick head count, and found not enough votes for a panic move of stripping Gardner of his authority, she scrapped the notion. The Union Leader torched her in a Friday editorial for ''trying to take the granite out of the Granite State.'' It remains to be seen if New Hampshire is punished down the road with fresh attempts to dislodge its pole position.
The candidates, with less than four months to work with, just want to get on with the politicking here. Iowa, it turns out, should have kept closer tabs on Delaware, and phoned Gardner for regular updates. Like the space probe that burned up because NASA screwed up the measurements, Iowa didn't nail down the details.
As often happens in politics, long-term trends can be obscured by the short-term fireworks and bluster. Gardner this year instigated a town-by-town review of the voter registration lists, which shows an inexorable leakage of party loyalty. The Republican and Democratic parties seem to be losing their hold on voters, and the ranks of voters eschewing party labels are growing. Here they are called ''undeclared'' voters; in Massachusetts, they are ''unenrolled.'' In the bigger world of politics, they are ''independent.''
Since last November, the town of Derry lost 84 Republicans and 20 Democrats, but gained 149 ''undeclareds.'' Hudson, the only town in New Hampshire that voted for the winners in every primary going back to 1952, a bellwether of bellwethers, lost 46 Republican voters and 335 Democrats since last November, but gained 235 ''undeclareds.''
And the pink sheets of updated voter registration totals accumulating in Gardner's high-ceilinged State House office tell him this: ''I think it's pretty fair to say the `undeclared' voters exceed either Republicans or Democrats.'' Why? It probably reflects some disillusionment with parties, labels, politics-as-usual. What is unusual here is the level of prosperity; New Hampshire is richer than ever, the prosperity palpable.
And that does not bode well for turnout. Some years, more than 80 percent of New Hampshire's registered voters will turn out, but that's usually triggered by hard times. Hyping turnout is the job of the various campaigns. They should adopt the course Paul Revere urged on Boston's privvy owners of 1799: Dig harder!
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
