The air was October crisp and the political rhetoric sizzling hot as Senator John E Sununu, one of the most vulnerable Republican incumbents in the country, introduced Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska to a boisterous crowd waving red pompoms in the bleachers of the Salem High School football field. “I have been in the Senate for six years, but I am still the youngest member of the US Senate,” Sununu, 44, declared from a lectern on the 50-yard line last week. “And I still have more experience than Barack Obama.” The crowd cheered and hooted and Sununu pushed the attack onward, his jabs echoing remarks at rallies with Palin, earlier in the day in Weirs Beach and in Dover, where he promoted Senator John McCain. “This is the ticket that America needs,” he said. If there was a swing state in America where a ticket headed by McCain was supposed to have long coattails it was New Hampshire, where he defied the odds to win presidential primaries in 2000 and 2008. But with McCain skidding in the polls amid a rising tide of Democrats here, Sununu is hardly hitching a ride to easy re-election. Instead, Sununu finds himself in a jam, forced to engage in raw politicking to help prop up the Republican ticket and energise the party’s apathetic base. But even as he is scheduled to appear at a rally with McCain on Wednesday in Goffstown, he also desperately needs to appeal to independents and Democrats at a time when persuading supporters of Obama to split the ticket may be his only hope of winning his own race. Sununu is in a grueling rematch against former Governor Jeanne Shaheen in a state that is emblematic of a national climate in which Republicans are in danger of ceding Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate majority for the first time in 30 years. New Hampshire voters know McCain well — he campaigned tirelessly here during the primary, and held more than 100 town-hall-style meetings. But some voters who supported him when he first ran in 2000 now say they are disappointed in McCain.
