enator Bob Smith of New Hampshire set out yesterday to find a new party, but what he's really lost is his old state.
In a speech on the floor of the US Senate, the two-term Republican confirmed that he is bolting the Grand Old Party to run for president as an independent.
It is amazing enough that a man who barely survived a reelection challenge two years ago sees himself as presidential timber. But it is positively astounding that he thinks he can succeed by abandoning the party that helped him hang onto his seat by his fingernails.
Where in the New Hampshire woods are these renegades that Smith imagines will embrace an agenda that he describes with Pat Buchanan-like fervor as ''pro-life,'' ''pro-Second Amendment,'' ''pro-military,'' and ''pro-sovereignty?'' (What is that last item exactly, an appeal to the monarchists among us? An odd position for a presidential candidate.)
File this doomed candidacy under: Mr. Smith goes to Washington and misses the changes taking place back home.
The Granite State's motto is still ''Live Free or Die,'' but gun control, abortion, and taxes are as divisive in New Hampshire as they are in the rest of the country.
The New Hampshire of hard-line conservatives, homogeneous small towns, and Republican domination has gone the way of the textile and shoe industries.
The number of registered Independents (271,715, compared to 272,115 Republicans in 1998) is growing as fast as the number of high-tech workers (84 of every 1,000 residents, according to the American Electronics Association). Newcomers outnumber natives. The state's southern tier looks less like a bucolic Currier and Ives scene than the Route 128 belt around Boston.
In matters political as well as economic the line between New Hampshire and Massachusetts is growing ever more blurry. Senator Edward M. Kennedy might be the image of politically liberal Massachusetts, but Governor William Weld was the more recent reality. New Hampshire Governor Mel Thomson was certainly a classic conservative, but the incumbent is not only a woman and a progressive, she's a Democrat who is able to say the words ''broad-based tax'' without flinching.
It is true that fewer than 8,000 of the state's 1.1 million residents are black, but a more liberal social climate is evidenced by the decision of lawmakers in May to make New Hampshire the last state in the union to finally recognize the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s birthday as a state holiday.
New Hampshire even offers children the chance to attend public kindergarten now.
If Smith is counting on the fact that Buchanan won the New Hampshire primary in 1996, he would do well to remember that the former Nixon speechwriter and syndicated columnist garnered only 27 percent of the vote. He won those votes primarily on the strength of workers' fears that free trade would cost them their jobs.
A robust economy has quieted those fears. A secure work force is less susceptible to the jingoism of a Pat Buchanan or a Bob Smith, a man who has distinguished himself on the Senate floor by waving color photographs of aborted fetuses in the faces of his colleagues.
It says everything about Smith that he signaled his interest yesterday in carrying the banner of the US Taxpayers Party into this campaign.
The Taxpayers Party was founded seven years ago by right-wing zealot Howard Phillips to inject ''Christian values'' into national politics. Phillips was the party's presidential nominee in 1992 and again in 1996, when his name was on the ballot in 39 states.
The party's platform endorses a repeal of the federal income tax, the abolition of welfare, the recognition of the legal personhood of a fetus from the moment of conception, and recognition of ''the Lord God as Creator, Preserver and Ruler of the Universe and of this Nation.''
If the US Taxpayers Party embodies his ideals, maybe what Senator Smith really means by sovereignty is theocracy. State-sponsored religion is bound to be a tough sell anywhere in the United States.
But nowhere more so than in New Hampshire, a state that has changed in almost every way but not in its storied independence.
