Sununu’s Planned Senate Bid Puts Wrench in GOP Machine

BOSTON —  The normally staid Republican party of New Hampshire flew into a tizzy Monday when Rep. John E. Sununu announced he would challenge incumbent Sen. Bob Smith in next year’s GOP primary.

The decision by the three-term congressman and son of former Gov. John H. Sununu set the stage for what is likely to be a bitter, divisive and expensive primary.

The race gained quick national attention because of the 50 to 49 advantage held by Democrats in the Senate. The winner of the New Hampshire GOP primary is expected to oppose the state’s popular three-term Democratic governor, Jeanne Shaheen, for the Senate seat.

At a news conference Monday in Concord, Sununu, 37, avoided mentioning Smith’s name. But he sent a jab in the direction of one of the Senate’s most conservative members by promising to be “a temperate and deliberate voice” in the Senate and “a senator who makes New Hampshire proud.”

Smith, 60, earned the wrath of many Republicans in Washington and his home state when he briefly abandoned the party in 1999 to run for president as an independent. In declaring his candidacy, he delivered a harsh rebuke to the GOP from the Capitol floor. He later returned to the Republican fold.

Though temporary, the defection was damaging.

“We all remember how he walked away from the party,” Edward Dupont, a former state Senate president and former Smith supporter, said Monday at Sununu’s news conference.

Dupont said he didn’t buy Smith’s apology on his return, “and I don’t think most Republicans are buying.”

Sununu and Smith share many ideological similarities. Both oppose abortion. Both are social and fiscal conservatives. Both support increased defense spending, and both have voiced approval for President Bush’s tax cuts.

One of their few areas of difference is that Sununu favors--and Smith opposes--drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.

Smith’s office in Washington had no comment Monday concerning Sununu’s long-anticipated announcement.

Earlier, however, Smith said the fight within his party would prove to be “the most divisive primary in the history of the state. It will be divisive and it will cost us the Senate seat and it will cost us the House seat [held by Sununu].” In Concord, state Democrats gleefully anticipated the prospect of a messy GOP primary.

“A real, take-your-gloves-off, come-out-swinging, very expensive primary,” said state Sen. Lou D’Allesandro, a Manchester Democrat. “A donnybrook.”

Colin Van Ostern of the state’s Democratic committee called the Smith-Sununu confrontation “a family fight.”

But John Dowd, chairman of the New Hampshire Republican committee, insisted that “the people involved, John Sununu and Bob Smith, are both gentlemen and positive campaigners. It is not in their makeup to have a nasty, divisive campaign.”

He added, moreover, that “after [the terrorist attacks of] Sept. 11, people are not in the mood for that kind of campaign.”

An ongoing, informal survey running daily in the Concord Monitor showed Smith and Sununu running an extremely close race.

Smith already has flooded the state with television commercials stressing his experience.

Shaheen has yet to formalize her candidacy, but her possible run for the Senate has won the blessing of top Democrats in the state.

Van Ostern said he hopes the governor will throw her hat into the ring. He said the fight on the opposite side of the aisle was of little concern because “our candidate will be running for the Senate, rather than running against whoever the Republican nominee is.”

Dowd acknowledged the importance of his state’s Senate race:

“As New Hampshire goes, perhaps so goes the Senate.”