Ex-New Hampshire Attorney General Kelly Ayotte, now first-time candidate for the United States Senate, is starting to come across one of the unfortunate and painful realities of real live campaigning: your would-be constituents occasionally want to know where you stand on, you know, actual issues.

This has proven a great inconvenience for Ms. Ayotte, who has studiously and diligently avoided taking a position on virtually any issue of significance, which has led to some degree of consternation among her would-be constituents:

Apparently, even granted the extremes of Jim DeMint and Susan Collins, Ms. Ayotte can’t pick a worthy role model in today’s Republican caucus (which says quite a bit about the Republican caucus, we think).

Nor is Ms. Ayotte, ostensibly a legal expert, able to take a position even on arcane issues of states’ rights which have been settled law for 170 years, such as Nullification (a cause last championed by Andrew Jackson’s vice president John C. Calhoun).

Skip Murphy, also of Gilford, sought Ayotte's opinion of a resolution introduced in several state legislatures, including the New Hampshire House of Representatives, empowering states to nullify acts of the federal government, which they determined exceeded its authority as granted by the constitution. "I haven't read the full text," confessed the former Attorney General, perhaps indicating the importance she attached to the legislation. "States rights need to be respected," she remarked. "That is a very important issue to me."

1835 welcomes you, Ms. Ayotte.