Bartlett Center Honors Packard As George Will Offers Hope After GOP Defeat

By Michael Graham, NH Journal

House Speaker Sherm Packard received the Josiah Bartlett Center for Public Policy’s 2026 Libertas Award at its dinner at the Grappone Conference Center Tuesday night.

Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist George F. Will was the featured speaker.

Packard, a Londonderry Republican finishing 18 terms in the House and three as speaker, told the crowd that defending the values of liberty and free markets would take work.

“Freedom is not free, and I think I hope maybe that might be one of our mantras going forward. Realize that we have to fight to be free every single day. We will succeed,” Packard said.

The Bartlett Center, founded in 1993, is an independent, nonprofit think tank advocating free markets and limited government. It is named for Josiah Bartlett, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and early New Hampshire governor. Previous Libertas honorees include former Education Commissioner Frank Edelblut in 2025 and entrepreneur and philanthropist Peter T. Paul in 2024.

In announcing Packard’s selection, center President Andrew Cline praised his fairness toward members of both parties and his advocacy for individual liberty.

“His selfless public service is an example to all,” Cline said.

The recognition came at a difficult moment for the NHGOP. Packard lost his reelection bid in Londonderry as Democrats captured a House supermajority, took control of the Senate and swept the five-member Executive Council. Current tallies put Democrats at 292 House seats and 15 of the Senate’s 24 seats. Gov. Kelly Ayotte won reelection, preserving Republican control of the governor’s office.

Packard used his acceptance speech to defend the Republican record during his six years as speaker, citing three successive balanced budgets and tax reductions, including during the closely divided 2023-24 session.

“We said we’re going to reduce your taxes,” he said.

In an onstage conversation with Cline, Will offered New Hampshire Republicans reason for optimism after last week’s blue wave, along with a warning about a political system increasingly organized around presidents rather than constitutional checks and balances.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post columnist reached back to Barry Goldwater’s 1964 presidential defeat, when the Republican nominee lost 44 states and commentators questioned his party’s future. Republicans subsequently won four of the next five presidential elections.

“The recuperative power of our nation and our states is enormous,” Will said.

The conversation ranged from the Declaration of Independence to social media, with Cline connecting the Bartlett Center’s advocacy of free markets and limited government to America’s founding principles. Founded in 1993, the nonprofit is named for Declaration signer and early New Hampshire Gov. Josiah Bartlett. jbartlett.org

Will focused on the Declaration’s use of the word “secure” to describe government’s relationship to individual rights.

“First come rights, and then comes government,” he said. “Government is limited to securing our rights and the conditions for their enjoyment.”

He contrasted that philosophy with Woodrow Wilson’s preference for a more interventionist government and praised James Madison’s understanding of incentives and institutional checks on power.

But Congress, Will argued, has surrendered much of its responsibility to presidents of both parties.

“Congress has become an enormous green room of 535 people trying to get on television,” he said.

Will cited presidential authority over tariffs and Democratic administrations’ actions on student loans, evictions and immigration as examples of the broader problem. He explicitly said his criticism extended beyond any particular president.

“The Senate and the House no longer consider themselves rivals to the executive branch; they consider themselves servants of the executive branch, and that is not healthy,” he said.

Political stalemate, he argued, can be a constitutional virtue.

“Gridlock is not an American problem; it’s an American achievement.”

Will also warned that social media allows people to avoid competing ideas and inhabit intellectual silos. Learning to handle that technology, he said, would require deliberate effort, particularly in teaching children.

His conservatism also included an acceptance that Americans have chosen programs such as Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Conservatives’ task, he argued, is to improve their operation.

Will closed on the economic dynamism he sees as central to American conservatism: social mobility, innovation and the freedom to produce changes no government planner can anticipate.

“The beauty of America is you don’t know what’s coming next,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be awful to live where you knew what was coming next?”

This story was originally published by the NH Journal, an online news publication dedicated to providing fair, unbiased reporting on, and analysis of, political news of interest to New Hampshire. For more stories from the NH Journal, visit NHJournal.com.