Having discovered that Southwest Airlines charges only $108 a trip each way from Philadelphia to the Manchester-Boston Airport and that rooms in New Hampshire hotels are affordable, my aversion to long car rides became irrelevant and I spent Friday and Saturday with a delegation from eastern Pennsylvania in New Hampshire.
Owen Jones, an Obama worker with deep family roots in New Hampshire who grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania and returned there within the last few years, greeted me at the airport and guided me to meetings with top New Hampshire Obama officials at the statwide office in Manchester, a pep rally at the office in Keene, door to door canvassing in Keene, and phone calls to people in the Keene area. Sheldon Motley, a Philadelphia Obama campaign co-chair, linked me to Jones, a gracious and enthusiastic host, and generally recruited and organized the trip of 17 or so Obama backers.
After spending much of 2007 in what turned out to be an unsuccessful effort to create a relevant primary for Pennsylvania instead of the April 22 irrelevant joke of a Presidential primary that we have now, it gradually dawned on me that the frontloaded schedule separates the early states from the early stages of the Pennsylvania primary (petition gathering and the like) and makes it possible for more Pennsylvanians such as myself to participate in New Hampshire and Iowa, places I have never previously been.
The January 8 New Hampshire primary will clearly reward the candidate with the best roots on college campuses, because it makes the Christmas-New Year's break far more important to political campaigning than it ever has been. Seeing huge numbers of student volunteers among the two hundred plus Obama workers I came into contact with--over 95% of whom are white--convinces me that Obama should a major beneficiary of this frontloaded schedule.
Talking to voters on a list of undecided or previously unreached voters (Democrats and Independents) supplied by the Obama campaign gave me further reason for optimism. Not one of the voters on the list said that he or she had decided to be for Clinton. Two of the voters said they were torn between Obama and Clinton; two others said they were for Ron Paul. Three listed as undecided said they were for Obama; one of the three had an apparent girlfriend not on our list who said she was for Obama, also.
One of our missions was to recruit people to attend events: Michele Obama is due to speak at Keene State University on December 5, and Senator Obama and Oprah Winfrey are due to appear in Manchester on December 9. When talking to the undecided voters, I was skeptical that they would be likely to attend these events, so I just described them in general terms. I was both surprised and gratified at least 3 or 4 undecided voters insisted on knowing the full details of these events, and expressed interest in coming.
Forty years ago, when the New Hampshire primary occurred much later, Eugene McCarthy famously visited New Hampshire uncertain as to whether or not he enter the primary there. He leisurely sampled public opinion, found little hostility to his candidacy, and a small number of people who knew who he was. He declared that he was quite encouraged, and soon ran in a virtual ties with President Lyndon Johnson, slightly behind him among Democrats, slightly ahead of him counting Republican write-ins.
Coming much later in the cycle, I too am encouraged. There seem to be a lot of New Hampshire voters taking their responsibility and power as early voters quite seriously. And the candidate I am backing, an African-American running in a state with very, very few African Americans, is being taken quite seriously in a state he has not been expected to win. He has 18 headquarters open here, significantly more than Howard Dean in 2004 (Dean had twelve) and apparently much more than Hillary Clinton, who Saturday's New York Times said had "several" headquarters in New Hampshire.
Clinton has the support of the vast majority of the party organization and more lawn signs that I could see than Obama has. But Obama clearly has a lot of engaging people on his side who have a strong commitment to his ideas, personality, and idealism, and an electorate that appears responsive to him and a history of breaking at the last minute for underdogs.
If Obama loses Iowa by more than a few votes, he will probably lose New Hampshire as well. But he appears close enough in New Hampshire now to carry it if he does well in Iowa. Since Iowa came onto the scene in 1976, no one who has carried both Iowa and New Hampshire has lost his party's nomination.
Obama's favorite phrase from Dr. Martin Luther King is "the fierce urgency of now." That phrase describes the dedication to him of his growing army, and the receptiveness of many in the New Hampshire electorate to his candidacy. He may not win New Hampshire, but just about everybody will know that he was here.