The primary nobody sees

The manager of the Center of New Hampshire, the state's largest hotel in Manchester, said in a C-SPAN interview the other day that he expects to start receiving inquires about the next New Hampshire Primary in about six months.

For those watching the action on tv the past couple of days, the Center played home to the Kerry campaign party last night and was the headquarters for NBC News since they rolled into the state last week.

There always comes a time in the Primary where outsiders question the value of the New Hampshire Primary and bring up the limitations the state has (very small, not diverse, and just plain cold) to play such an important role in the Democractic process.

They indicate that the era of "retail politics" is over and that, in the long run, New Hampshire primary voters get their information the same way voters for the primaries that will dot the landscape in the coming weeks do: by watching the candidates on tv and reading about them in the paper. They seem to believe that the primary only gets interesting when the national and international press rolls into town.

Having the media here is pretty exciting. You never know who will be on the other end of the phone when it rings or who you'll meet out on the street. We were featured in a special report they did for the on-line version of the Washington Post and I took part in a poll conducted by the Los Angeles Times during this primary.

But what they don't see is what's happening in the New Hampshire primary when no one is watching. The manager at the Holiday Inn said it all in his interview. The courting by potential 2008 candidates will begin in the non-too-distant future.

Two individuals we met in the Edwards camp indicated they got interested two years ago when Edwards paid a visit to their homes and met with their neighbors. Neither of those occasions were caught by the tv cameras - but it resulted in a core of strong supporters who stuck with the Senator until he reached the point where the press took an interest.

Maybe I won't fight for the right to be "First in the Nation" to the death as Joe Lieberman promised, but I will always remain a firm supporter of that status. Like so many things we discovered about the Granite State when we moved here from Ohio over 20 years ago, it's kind of quirky, but it works. And, like I said in my first blog on this site, I had never met my Senator (Glenn) from Ohio in Ohio -- I met him here as a result of the Primary.

I'll close with a recap of my Primary voting experience.

I stood in the voting booth for some time, making my final decision. While while John Edwards caught my imagination, John Kerry got my vote.

In the end, it was the overall experience of Kerry that gained him the mark in the box next to his name. That's pretty much been the issue for me throughout the campaign. I knew early on that I wasn't looking for a Washington outsider to lead the country; I wanted someone who had "been there, done that."

As it turned out, I actually went to the polls twice yesterday.

The first time was to vote. While I was there, I delivered some foot warmers to my husband. I held his sign while he went to the car to put them in his boots and met the two other people who were at the polls in support of Edwards. They were students from Florida who were in the state as part of the government class project.

The younger one asked if I thought it was a problem if her toes were turning purple. I put her in George's car with the heater on and ran home to get more foot warmers. When I caught up with George later in the day, he said he had run into them at campaign headquarters and they were heading out to another polling place, so I guess they -- like the rest of us -- had survived the 2004 New Hampshire Primary.