What you don't know about Doug Lambert won't hurt you

So don't read this profile

Doug Lambert is many things: business owner, newspaper columnist, blogger, radio host, activist, budget committee member, and a husband and a father. He could be accused of many things, but lazy is not one of them.

"I'm the consummate multi-tasker," he said during an interview last week.

He gets up at 4 a.m. every day, and his first task is reviewing the blog postings he and his partner Skip Murphy wrote the evening before, and he then posts the items that will appear on their two blogs, granitegrok.com and gilfordgrok.com, and then by 5:30 he's off to work at the metal fabricating business, DGF Industrial Innovations Group, located off Lilly Pond road, that he and his wife Gisele own.

Throughout the work day, Lambert is juggling his various roles, gathering information for his blogs and radio shows while running the business. His office reflects his lifestyle: papers taped to the wall alternate between diagrams for products to be fabricated and political stickers and slogans. There's a piece of the Berlin Wall, photos of Lambert with various candidates, and a figurine holding a sign reading, "You can agree with me, or you can be wrong."

On the workshop floor, where the nine employees of DGF weld and cut steel, the water cooler is adorned with a picture of Hillary Clinton, a short mustache added with black marker.

A native of Rhode Island, Lambert moved to New Hampshire in 1985 and married Gisele in 1988. The newlyweds were two of the owners who opened the Dunkin' Donuts store in Laconia on Union Ave, but sold the business to one of its original owners after a year. "The restaurant business wasn't really where it was at for us," Lambert said, although he and Gisele learned a lot about running a business through the experience.

The Lamberts started D & G Fabrications in 1989, specializing in producing aftermarket replacement parts for heavy equipment in the waste-to-energy industry. Eventually the company's name was changed to DGF Industrial Innovations, because Lambert said the original name "sounded kind of 'family garage'".

It was in New Hampshire that Lambert, now 43, came to terms with his political persuasions and became motivated to act on them.

Lambert, who said he has always been an avid newspaper reader, began reading the Manchester Union Leader when he moved to the Granite State, and found himself sympathetic to the column penned by conservative Pat Buchanan. "It was then that I realized, 'yes, I'm a conservative.'"

What does it mean to Doug to be a conservative? "The beauty of America is the we have this free marketplace where everybody works toward their own self-interest and contributes to the common good." Lambert, a disciple of Niccolo Machiavelli and Sun Tzu, believes that human beings will naturally act to benefit themselves and their families, which isn't such a bad thing.

"I want the government to do as little as possible and to take as little as possible from me and my employees," he said. He doesn't believe that the Founding Fathers intended the government to forcibly transfer wealth from one group of people to another.

Once he had found his political stripes, though, he didn't immediately feel the need to do anything about it. It took a family crisis to do that.

Elise, their first daughter, was entering second grade in the Gilford system. Doug and Gisele were beginning to become wary of the school, because they felt that sharp students like their daughter were being discouraged from learning at a rate that was faster than the rest of the class. The Lamberts asked to see the second grade curriculum, and were told there wasn't one.

When Doug saw a notice of a meeting for the Budget Committee, he decided to attend and see if he could get some answers. In retrospect, that group wasn't the most appropriate one to bring his complaint to, but Lambert admits he didn't know the difference between that committee, the Selectboard or the School Board. "All I knew was that I was really unhappy with second grade."

Doug now serves on the Budget Committee, which has, controversially, become the seat of considerable influence in town.

He started writing columns in 1997, first published in the Weirs Times, and printed in The Daily Sun every Thursday since 2002.

He and Murphy started their blog about state issues, GraniteGrok.com, in May of 2006. A month later they started a blog about Gilford politics, GilfordGrok.com.

In October of that year they started the weekly two-hour radio program about local blogging and politics, "Meet the New Press," which is heard on WEMJ 1490 AM on Saturday mornings. "It all happened fast," said Lambert. He credited Murphy's technological know-how with getting everything off the ground.

Even though it's only been around for a pair of years, GraniteGrok is the leading conservative blog in the state, getting about 1,000 hits per day.

Of all of his projects, the blogs have been the most controversial, especially as Lambert will blog about issues that have come before the Budget Committee that he sits on. "I find myself in a really odd position," he said. "I'm covering the news, writing about the news and I am the news. I'm finding the line between media, citizen and activist is really blurred."

At times, fellow board members have questioned his blogging, but Lambert won't quit. It's his right to speak freely, he said, and if another board member doesn't like what he says, let him exercise his own freedom of speech. "The answer to anyone who's uncomfortable with it is to start their own blog... the answer is more free speech."

More free speech, and more citizen vigilance, too. Just as Lambert believes citizens will naturally act in their own best interest, so too he thinks politicians, even local ones like himself, will sometimes act for themselves at the expense of the community. They can only get away with it when the public isn't looking. "The biggest cause of local dysfunction is apathy on the part of the citizenry — even people with the best of intentions can go astray." It's the role of people like Lambert to "hold their feet to the fire."

"As a citizen and as a business owner, I am under constant assault by the government. I don't get the chance to almost abide by the rules, and almost pay my taxes." He feels that the people who are most likely to break the laws are those who make them. "Any time that I can push back, I'm going to," he said.

There's an irony in his "pushing back," because, as an activist in Belknap County, the vast majority of the local politicians are members of his own party. He has no qualms, though, when it comes to taking fellow Republicans to task. "I expect good things from my party," he said.

His most recent public alliance has been with former Laconia Mayor Tom Tardif. Since last fall, the two of them have been a considerable thorn in the side of the all-Republican Belknap County Commission and heavily-Republican (16 to 2) Belknap County Convention, forcing their fellow party members to conduct business more openly and to do things by the book.

Among their several accomplishments was the invalidating of the 2008 county budget that was passed by the Convention this past Spring on the grounds it the public was not given its legally-mandated opportunity to comment of the proposal last December. The county is now operating under a so-called "default" budget that Commissioners originally submitted in the late fall.

Lambert and Tardif still have one legals case against county officials pending before the N.H. Supreme Court, where they are asking that elected officials such as the sheriff and county attorney be exempted from any consideration as county "employees".