Michael Kitch

LACONIA -- Arnie Arnesen brought her own impassioned brand of liberal evangelism to a small but rapt audience of two dozen at a meeting of city Democratic Committee at Woodland Heights School last night. The former state representative, gubernatorial candidate and college teacher, who has enjoyed a nomadic career on radio and television, spoke without notes for some 40 minutes, taking as her theme the fraying of the American social fabric under the twin pressures of global competition and corporate power.

Arnesen took as her text remarks of Herb Meyer, a former editor of Fortune Magazine who served in the intelligence community during the Reagan Administration, prophesying that "everyone is on their way to becoming an independent contractor. The new workforce contract will be, show up at the my office five days a week and do what I want you to do, but you handle your own insurance, benefits, health care and everything else."

"That person they are walking away from is you and me," Arnesen said, recalling that when her first daughter was born she was working 50 hours a week at three part-time jobs with no health insurance, because insurance carriers were not required to include employees working less than 30 hours a week in group plans.

Animated, humorous and passionate, Arnie Arnesen delighted local Democrats last evening.

Although she sponsored legislation that addressed the issue, Arnesen discovered that when she ran for governor her husband had secretly agonized over whether to pay their property taxes or insurance premiums, ultimately paying the taxes to spare her the political consequences of being a delinquent taxpayer.

Recalling an international women's conference, Arnesen said that American and European women were asked what they wanted. The Americans, she said, wanted money to ensure the health and education of their children, but the Europeans chose time to spend with their children, whose health and education were assured.

Arnesen called for "some sort of social contract" to ensure what she called "employability security" in a world without employment security. In particular, she stressed that access to healthcare and education, for which the cost is spiraling beyond the means of working families, is essential.

"We have to change the conversation," Arnesen said. She suggested that President Ronald Reagan fundamentally changed how Americans perceive themselves. "He turned citizens into taxpayers," she said, explaining that when faced with problems taxpayers "bitch about what it will cost them" while citizens "ask what do we have to do together." Reagan, she said, was the first of an unbroken line of presidents fixed on "the cost of everything and the value of nothing."

Surprisingly, Arnesen fondly quoted President Calvin Coolidge, who she said wisely remarked that patriotism meant "looking after myself by looking after my country."