There's nothing like being away from your routine to get you out of a funk. I'm in DC for work, so I naturally figured I'd be away from the blog for a while with nothing to report. Alas, you can take the voter out of NH, but you can't take NH out of the voter.
I flew out of Manchester-Boston Regional Airport (formerly just Manchester Airport) on Saturday, and I hadn't been there in a while. I was hoping I'd see a candidate or entourage maybe, but no luck. So I tried to view the tiny airport from the perspective of someone like my fellow blogger, Joe at
www.newhampshire2007.blogspot.com, who's coming to NH from VA to experience a week or two in a front row seat. (We didn't plan it this way, but we've basically switched places for a week.) Biggest thing I noticed were the advertising displays. One from SEIU, another from that Chronic Disease foundation, and others, suggesting questions to ask if you run into a candidate in NH.
On Saturday afternoon I played tourist in DC a bit & visited some Nat'l Monuments & gift shops. They seem to have more tacky souvenirs related to the primary & election than you can find in NH. Most candidates are represented, but you can guess who is represented the most. HINT: there's a bobblehead of her for sale. After I saw that and was moping around thinking "is this really preordained?" I was walking by the USDA, where there's a TREE dedicated to her AND another tree she "planted." Back in my hotel room I was ready to give up when I read some NH websites & listened to a bit of NHPR and regained my hope. I don't think folks in NH are really ready to roll over and crown another legacy candidate so quickly. [To answer GraniteProf's rhetorical question about democratic primary voters & the upset victory: NO, we haven't lost our stomach for it...please!] The words "sense of entitlement" came up, along with annoyance that Hillary seems to be skipping the NH Primary and is running a general election campaign already. That gave me a great deal of hope.
Two more things happened to pull me out of my own doldrums: First, on my walk to my meeting (which took me past the Whitehouse), I spotted Friday's Washington Post. Topic of headline article: Bill Gardner & the setting of the NH Primary date. (great article!) Then, as I was participating in my meetings, it became the joke of the room full of folks from all over the country, when we repeatedly had to introduce ourselves to various presenters, that "My name is Paula, I'm from the University of New Hampshire, and no, I do not know when the NH Primary will be held." Everyone wanted to know how it was going on the ground, and what the main stream media was missing. When I relayed some reports of events I have attended and candidates I've seen or met, I was even surprised to hear many say that they were impressed with the level of questions Granite Staters ask, basically supporting the NH Primary as First in the Nation, because they didn't think their home state average joes would ask such tough questions or make the candidates jump threw so many hoops and shake so many hands. For example, when I told them of the popularity of Ron Paul, I got more than one "who's that?"
And besides, someone will always have to go first, and everyone agrees that it should not be a big and powerful state. In the famous words of Johnny Damon, when he was part of Red Sox Nation: Why not us??
OK, I'm back...and I'm ready to go home now.
