LEBANON — About 250 people braved the New Year’s Day chill to hear Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang speak from the bandstand in Colburn Park on his vision for the country and the problems that he believes President Donald Trump is ignoring and does not understand.
Moved outside from the Salt hill Pub on a mild mid-winter day, at least by New Hampshire standards, the event drew many who sported MATH ball caps, shorthand for the Yang campaign slogan “Make America Think Harder,” and others who said Yang will get their vote in the Feb. 11 primary.
Fritz Feick, 62, a filmmaker from Lyme, had supported U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., until he first heard Yang speak in Hanover a few weeks ago.
“I see the seeds of great leadership. I saw that with Andrew and that is when I changed my vote,” Feick said inside Salt hill before the event was moved to the nearby park. “I think he has a unique experience and a perspective based on helping people that is well informed.”
Yang’s remarks focused on the changing economy that he said will increasingly rely on what he called the “fourth industrial revolution” of technology, software, data and artificial intelligence, not manufacturing. One example is the creation of autonomous trucks that could one day displace 3.5 million truckers and another 7 million related jobs.
Yang said despite the success of the nonprofit he started, Venture for America, which helps struggling cities create new jobs, he felt those cities he worked in were moving in the wrong direction. And while Trump capitalized on promising to bring manufacturing jobs back to many hard hit areas to win in 2016 and build a wall to stop illegal immigration, those promises will only take the country backward, he said.
“You know we have to do the opposite of these things,” Yang said. “We have to turn the clock forward.”
On his signature campaign promise to pay every American $1,000 a month, Yang compared it to the oil dividend paid to Alaskans except this would be taxed from the big technology companies such as Facebook, Amazon and Google that he said are reaping billions in profits but paying little in taxes.
It is money, Yang and his audience said in a call-and-response, that would most likely be spent locally to help Main Street businesses.
“This is the economy you can make a reality,” Yang said. “It is up to you, New Hampshire, to rewrite the rules of the 21st century economy to work for us, work for our people.”
Yang said he sought out leaders in Washington a few years ago after Trump’s election to discuss his concerns about the changing economy but said he was told he was in the “wrong town,” and Washington was a place of “followers, not leaders.”
“The only way we will do something about it is for you to create a wave in other parts of the country and bring that wave crashing down on our heads,” Yang said he was told. “That was two years ago and I said, ‘Challenge accepted.’
“You are the wave, New Hampshire,” he continued to applause. “I love campaigning here because you have the future of the country in your hands. You have the power. What will you do with it? What direction will you take the country?”
As he stood to leave, Hanover resident Bill Tingle said he was impressed but was still making up his mind.
“I think he has a very valuable and realistic outlook on our situation and understands the underlying causes,” Tingle said.
Patrick O’Grady can be reached at pogclmt@gmail.
