For people who might have moved to New Hampshire a year ago, you can be forgiven for wondering how the voters of this great state ever could have put into office two jokers like U.S. Sen. John E. Sununu and former Gov. Jeanne Shaheen.

Because if you believe those nasty TV ads and what the candidates are saying about each other, it would be difficult to believe anything other than:

• Sununu is a clone of President Bush, sold his soul to Wall Street in return for campaign contributions and wants to put all seniors at risk by privatizing their Social Security benefits.

• Shaheen never met a tax she didn't like – we believe the actual phrase is "Jeanne Shaheen has been a taxing machine" – is incapable of taking a firm position without first testing the political winds, and flip-flopped on key issues such as the war in Iraq and the Bush tax cuts.

Of course, as is usually the case in today's political campaigns, each of these accusations is based on a small kernel of truth and then blown up to the point of hyperbole.

But given that this race is a rematch of the hotly contested "phone-jamming" election of 2002 – which Sununu won by a mere 4.4 percentage points – Sununu-Shaheen II has taken on an even uglier tone, much to the chagrin of voters who would prefer to elect their public servants based on something other than fear and a distrust of the other candidate.

Like many of you, we believe these important decisions should be based on what each candidate brings to the table in terms of their qualifications for office: Leadership. Experience. Performance. Character. Those are the key attributes on which wise voting decisions are made.

It's for those reasons, then, that The Telegraph today endorses Sununu, the son of a former governor and White House chief of staff, for re-election to the U.S. Senate.

After meeting with the two candidates earlier this month and observing them during the yearlong campaign, we believe the 44-year-old engineer has a better command of the issues and is deserving of a return trip to Washington for another six-year term.

As you might expect, our editorial board fully anticipated this to be a difficult decision. After all, we have been longtime supporters of Shaheen, backing her initial bid for the state's corner office in 1996 and her re-election bids in 1998 and 2000.

Truth be told, we also endorsed her over Sununu in the 2002 race for the Senate seat, which became available after Sununu – then a three-term member of the U.S. House of Representatives – ousted incumbent Sen. Robert Smith in the GOP primary.

But Sununu has grown significantly during the past six years, living up to his billing by Time magazine several years ago as one of the five "up-and-comers" in the Senate.

At the time, the magazine cited him for his work on lobbying-reform legislation and for challenging the Bush administration to strengthen civil-liberties provisions in the Patriot Act prior to its reauthorization.

In today's supercharged partisan atmosphere on Capitol Hill, a willingness to work with members of the other party to get things accomplished is absolutely critical.

That's why we were pleased to note Sununu's movement in that direction on several fronts:

• He played a leadership role along with Sen. Tom Carper, a Delaware Democrat, to pass a seven-year ban on taxing the Internet last year.

• He worked with Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy, of Vermont, to get bipartisan support two years ago for the New England Wilderness Protection Act, which protected 34,500 acres of federal land in the White Mountain National Forest in New Hampshire and another 47,000 acres in the Green Mountain National Forest in Vermont.

• And, as mentioned earlier, he bucked the Bush administration and his party in working with Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin and other Democrats to better protect civil liberties prior to the passage of the USA Patriot Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005.

This is not to suggest that Sununu is a maverick-in-training, nor does it take away from his staunch support over the years of many of Bush's policies – a good number of which we do not support.

But we believe the state's junior senator has taken some important strides in recent years to work in a more bipartisan fashion – an approach that will be absolutely critical if this nation is going to have any chance of solving its most pressing problems.