Gov. Craig Benson (R) Elected 2002, 1st term up Jan. 2005
Born:	Oct. 8, 1954, New York, NY
Home:	Rye
Education:	Babson Col., B.S. 1977; Syracuse U., M.B.A. 1979
Religion:	Catholic
Marital Status:	married (Denise)
Professional Career:	President and CEO, Cabletron Systems, 1983-99.
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Craig Benson, a Republican, was elected governor of New Hampshire in 2002 in his first run for political office. Benson grew up in Chatham, New Jersey, and graduated from Babson College in 1977 and Syracuse University business school in 1979. At that time Massachusetts was perhaps the biggest high-tech center in the country, and Benson went to work for Teradyne in Boston. In 1981 he switched to Inetlan in Chelmsford, near Lowell. In 1983 he and Robert Levine started Cabletron in Levine's garage in Ashland, west of Boston. Most of Massachusetts's high-tech energy was going into producing mainframes and minicomputers, systems sold to just one customer. Benson and Levine noted the suddenly surging sales of personal computers, and saw a need for custom cables to link personal computers. In 1985 Cabletron moved to an old mill building in Rochester, New Hampshire; one attraction was the fact that New Hampshire had no income or sales tax. With an aggressive sales force and a commitment to customer service, Cabletron grew rapidly. The company went public in 1989 and had huge growth in the early 1990s. In 1990 Benson challenged New Hampshire's Business Profits Tax in court and put $12 million in escrow, at a time when Cabletron accounted for 7% of total revenues.

Cabletron's culture has been described by the Concord Monitor: "Cabletron was the cowboy from New Hampshire, the up-from-nothing, reflexively contrarian street fighter--outwardly confident, secretly paranoid, dazzlingly inventive, surpassingly energetic, often crass, sometimes cruel, rewarding those who thrived, expelling those who didn't--for better and for worse." In 1994 a federal court jury ruled that Benson had discriminated against a woman employee; he denied the charge, and pointed out that 40% of Cabletron's managers were women. The high-tech business is volatile, and Cabletron's successes did not go on forever. In the middle 1990s Cabletron's biggest competitor was California-based Cisco. Cabletron had the edge in switches, but Cisco had an advantage in routers. But Cisco began buying up switching companies, leaving Cabletron at a competitive disadvantage; Cisco soon captured 90% of the computer networking market; the approach championed by Cabletron's chief technology guru, a non-college graduate whose products had worked brilliantly in the past, did not prevail in the marketplace. Cabletron's stock price plummeted in 1997 and 1998, Benson left the company in 1999 and in 2000 Cabletron was split into four separate companies. But Benson had sold enough of his Cabletron stock to accumulate a fortune estimated at $600 million when he decided to run for governor in 2002.

New Hampshire has never elected a governor to four two-year terms and Democratic incumbent Jeanne Shaheen, first elected in 1996, filed an exploratory committee for a Senate race in August 2001. The great issue of Shaheen's governorship was how state government would pay for the vastly increased state aid to local schools required by the state Supreme Court in December 1997 and whether the state would end its longtime tradition and enact a sales or income tax. Shaheen had taken the pledge not to support a sales or income tax in 1996 and 1998. Her veto threat blocked an income tax in April 1999 and in June 1999 the legislature adopted a statewide property tax instead. In 2000 Shaheen refused to take the pledge, and in 2001 she supported a 2.5% sales tax. But the legislature rejected that in April, and the statewide property tax remained and business taxes were increased.

This was the backdrop to what became New Hampshire's most expensive gubernatorial race ever. There were three Republican candidates who largely self-financed their campaigns; all took the pledge. There were two serious Democratic candidates who both backed an income tax. The fiercest contest was in the Republican primary. Benson set out a platform based on his high-tech experience: upgrade state government from Version 1.0, put in real world management practices, gives incentives for saving, encourage public-private partnerships. He said he would cap state education spending at about $900 million for five years; he argued that many towns used the state education money to free up other funds for other programs. He called for a constitutional amendment capping state government spending and requiring a two-thirds vote in the legislature for tax increases and a constitutional amendment to overturn the state Supreme Court's 1997 decision.

Another Republican, Gordon Humphrey, attacked Benson vigorously. Back in 1978 and 1984 Humphrey had been elected to the U.S. Senate, and in 1990 kept his term-limit promise and did not run again. Instead, he got elected to the state Senate where he opposed a sales or income tax. In 2000 he ran against Shaheen and lost by only a 49%-44% margin. He pledged to cut property taxes by 10% and attacked Benson relentlessly--for the 1994 lawsuit, for SEC investigations into the Cabletron spinoffs, for his campaign contributions to Democrats, including Shaheen. Also running was former state Senator Bruce Keough, former chairman of the board of trustees of the state university system. He called for targeting current state education aid at the neediest schools. He did not join in the vitriolic criticism of Benson. This was a race in which money talked. Benson spent $9.2 million on the primary campaign, $8.7 million of it his own. Humphrey spent $3.9 million, $3.7 million of it his own. Keough spent $1.9 million, virtually all of it his own. Just by himself Benson spent more than was spent by all candidates in both primary and general elections in the gubernatorial race in 2000. But the primary results were not proportionate to spending. Benson won, with just 37% of the vote. Keough, moving up late in the polls, was second with 34%. Humphrey, perhaps because of his negative campaigning--always risky in a multi-candidate race--was third with 28%. Turnout was huge: 152,000, far more than in any previous state primary.

Benson, the high-tech entrepreneur, is one type of New Hampshire character; Mark Fernald, the Democratic nominee, is another. Fernald grew up in a Yankee Republican family and took a job at his father's law firm doing estate planning and business law in 1988. As a private citizen he watched New Hampshire's fiscal struggle and decided he had found the solution: an income tax. In 1998, he ran for the state Senate as (to his father's surprise) a Democrat; he won and Democrats for the first time in years won a Senate majority. The state legislature seemed on the verge of passing an income tax, but was stopped by Governor Shaheen's veto threat; Fernald walked into Shaheen's office in December 1999 and announced he would run in the primary against her if she did not reconsider; when she didn't budge, he decided to run. He lost, but by only 61%-38%, a narrow margin in a primary against an incumbent governor, he carried the western part of the state and towns hit hard by the statewide property tax. In 2002 he ran for governor again. In the Democratic primary he faced state Senator Beverly Hollingworth, also an income tax backer. This was not a big money race like the Republican primary: Fernald spent $307,000, Hollingworth $287,000. Fernald won 56%-44%.

In the two-month general election campaign Fernald stuck doggedly to his advocacy of the income tax. He charged that Benson was responsible for the Business Enterprise Tax, enacted after his lawsuit against the Business Profits Tax, and argued that an income tax would permit property taxes to be cut in half. Benson cited his own experience for his opposition to an income tax: "When Cabletron moved here, we had 17 employees. If New Hampshire had an income tax, we would never have grown to 7,000. The reason we beat 300 competitors from other states, the reason we beat IBM, HP and Digital, was because we had an advantage, the New Hampshire advantage. Other companies had to account for the income tax in their employee compensation; they had higher labor costs. It made them less competitive." Media polls never showed the race close, and much more attention went to the close Senate race between Shaheen and John Sununu. Benson, who obviously could have spent much more, spent only $880,000 between the primary and the general; Fernald spent only $168,000. New Hampshire, after flirting with the Democratic party in the 1990s, seemed to return to its old Republican roots. Benson won 59%-38%. Fernald carried only the clusters of towns around the college towns of Durham, Keene and Hanover, plus the state capital of Concord, trendy Portsmouth and his home area around Peterborough.

Benson promised to sign many of the bills Shaheen vetoed and to keep state education spending at $904 million. He called for public school choice and accountability in education. "I want to make sure every student and every teacher is measured for progress. I don't see how you can figure out whether we're doing well or poorly if you don't measure it."

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State House Rm. 208, 107 N. Main St., Concord 03301, 603-271-2121; Fax: 603-271-2130; Web: www.state.nh.us/governor.

Election Results (More Info)
	Candidate	Total Votes	Percent
2002 general	Craig Benson (R)	259,663	59%
	Mark Fernald (D)	169,277	38%
	Other	14,036	3%
2002 primary	Craig Benson (R)	56,099	37%
	Bruce Keough (R)	51,461	34%
	Gordon Humphrey (R)	42,698	28%
	Other	2,214	1%
2000 general	Jeanne Shaheen (D)	275,038	49%
	Gordon Humphrey (R)	246,952	44%
	Mary Brown (I)	35,904	6%