How She Does It
The governor of New Hampshire does not live in the governor’s mansion. Instead, Maggie Hassan lives on the grounds of Phillips Exeter Academy, the exclusive 228-year-old prep school of the Northeast’s privileged set, where her husband, Thomas Hassan, has been the principal since 2008—a job that comes with lodging in a stately colonial on the school’s campus.
The Hassans' is thus the marriage of two New England institutions, and the house in Exeter has opened Maggie Hassan to charges of elitism. (The name, pronounced “HASS-un,” comes from Tom’s Black Irish ancestors, thought to be the result of some long-ago Moorish migration.) An attack ad aired during her 2012 campaign faulted her for living in "a half-million-dollar home that Hassan pays no property taxes on,” failing to mention her husband’s job and that they don’t own it. Before I visited their house last month, I imagined Maggie and Tom—who met at Brown—hosting tea for Brahmins on an opulent lawn, he in headmasterish tweed, she in, say, a Colonial-style powdered wig. More realistically, perhaps the end of the term would find her marking up budgets while he marked up final exams, or plotting strategy in a campaign war room next door to a pizza party of well-scrubbed junior WASPs.
But if I thought I would encounter a scene from Preppy Heaven, what I found instead at the Hassans' was rather more prosaic: the overscheduled life of a high-powered professional couple, one half of which just happens to get picked up for work by a state trooper. The house in Exeter turned out to be a symbol of what Maggie Hassan represents as a politician—just not in the way I expected.
more
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/how-she-does-it/360471/
