Meet the Clinton loyalists
EXETER, New HampshireFor best friends Debbie Crapo and Nancy Richards-Stower, Bill Clinton's return to New Hampshire on Monday meant another day on the trail they'd been on with both Clintons spanning the last 25 years.
The women, from Rye and Merrimack, proudly wore the Clinton campaign swag they've collected over the last quarter century and cheered Bill Clinton on in the same way they always have -- holding up signs, whistling, cheering, and clapping loudly. They talked glowingly about their two old friends, Bill and Hillary, to anyone who would listen.
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And Bill Clinton's day out on the trail also meant their band was officially back together: the "breakfast club" -- the eight founding members of President Clinton's first presidential run in New Hampshire -- were all together again.
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Richards-Stower, who hosted Clinton's very first New Hampshire primary event in Nashua on Oct. 7, 1991, was initially skeptical that a political spouse could have much of an impact on demanding Granite State Democrats eager to meet with the candidate himself. Nonetheless, three days after Bill Clinton's first event that year, she decided to host an event for his wife.
"I told Hillary that she might be a big deal in Arkansas but that here, the spouses were kind of like second-tier, so if people acted a little disappointed if she were the guest, not to take it so hard," Richards-Stower recalled of their initial conversation.
"So she goes, 'Nancy my skin is THIS thick -- I'll do what you all tell me.' About three days later, we did the first Hillary event. She was a star."
While waiting in the back of a town hall in Exeter for Bill Clinton to take the stage, standing arm-in-arm with Richards-Stower, Crapo reminisced driving him around the state in her Dodge Caravan, introducing him to other Democrats, many of them "real liberals" who feared he was too moderate for them.
"Now they'd love to have him -- he'd get elected for a third term if it was legal," Crapo joked.
Covered in pins from each of the Clintons' three previous presidential bids, some of them slightly rusted, they spoke excitedly of Clinton's "Arkansas crew" making the trip up for the week leading up for the Feb. 9 first-in-the-nation primary.
"We are not rich. We did not give $10,000 to the campaign but we get invited to everything," Crapo said after reflecting on their day hitting a campaign stop in Nashua, a private lunch at the Puritan backroom in Manchester, and another stop in Exeter with the former president. "He knows us."
The sentiment that the president-turned-political-spouse was now espousing throughout the state, that his wife is still "the same girl I fell in love with in law school" -- a "change maker" and a loyal friend -- rang true for Richards-Stower and Crapo.
"Don't every trust anybody who doesn't have old friends," Crapo said before launching into a story from 2008, when her daughter was diagnosed with cancer the night Crapo was to attend a fundraiser headlined by Bill Clinton for Hillary Clinton's first presidential campaign.
"It was a quarter to ten, and I answered the phone and thought, 'Who the hell is calling me?'" Crapo recalled. "I hear, 'Deb, this is Hillary Clinton.' She's in Boston, running for president of the U.S. I said, 'You didn't need to call me.' She says, 'Wouldn't you call me if it was Chelsea?'"
Crapo said that Clinton called routinely for the next six months -- until her daughter was cancer-free.
"How lucky if you are a political organizer to have had the universe stick you in New Hampshire," Richards-Stower exclaimed. "You don't have to be an important person, you don't have to be wealthy, and you can end up being friends with the president of the United States."