E-Mail This Article to a Friend A brand-new campaign (continued)

SHORTLY BEFORE noon, the Manchester City Library auditorium is packed to overflowing, waiting for John Edwards to take the stage. But who are all these folks? Or, as New York Times reporter Adam Clymer puts it to Boston Globe columnist Tom Oliphant, "Are there any real people here, or is it just press?"

Speaking of real: like all the campaigns, the Edwards operation has arrayed a bunch of ordinary people behind the podium so that Edwards will have a suitably Norman Rockwell–esque backdrop when he delivers his remarks. I spot a guy in the back row. He is wearing a black-and-white plaid shirt, a red T-shirt underneath, and a Red Sox cap. Now, think about it. If you were asked to appear on national television and in newspaper photographs across the country, wouldn’t you put on a jacket and a tie? Yes, you would. That would be real. This, of course, is fake. But it looks real, and that’s the point.

Edwards, true to form, gives a terrific speech, full of populist fire and folksiness. Unlike Dean and Kerry, Edwards has run an entirely positive campaign, undercut only slightly by the fact that he keeps bragging about it. His ire is directed not at his fellow Democrats but, rather, at corrupt dealings that leave average people behind. He talks about "the two governments in Washington," one for the rich, the powerful, and the well-connected, and one for everybody else. At a strategic point, he says, "I’ll tell you what we ought to do about these Washington lobbyists. We ought to cut them off at the knees."

Later, I wait outside for Edwards to appear. I talk briefly with a guy who tells an NPR reporter that — weirdly enough — he’s torn between Edwards and Ohio congressman Dennis Kucinich, the lefty firebrand. A woman tells me that she decided to support Edwards after she read his book, Four Trials, which made her cry. (I’m not making fun; I choked up, too. See "Don’t Quote Me," News and Features, January 16.)

After freezing our asses off, Edwards finally appears, makes a few brief comments that I can barely hear from my less-than-ideal vantage point, and takes off.

So do I.

IF YOU’VE GOT Massachusetts plates on your car, you do not want to speed in New Hampshire. Trust me; I’ve got the surcharges to prove it. So I’m late by the time I arrive at the University of New Hampshire, in Durham, to hear Joe Lieberman speak. When I finally locate the room, just before 2:30 p.m., a stream of people is filing out.

But all is not lost. I strike up a conversation with a pair of undecided voters who had been leaning toward Dean: Ingrid Nugent, who’s finishing up a degree in energy studies, and Karen Alexander, a staff researcher with UNH’s Gulf of Maine Cod Project. Nugent had gone so far as to put a Dean bumper sticker on her car. But she was impressed with Lieberman. "I basically heard that Joe is really in support of a lot of the same things I am," she tells me. "I like the New Democrat ideals and policy points." Alexander says she’s impressed with Lieberman’s work in helping to clean up Long Island Sound.

So what about Dean? Nugent hasn’t entirely given up on him, but she offers a cogent if understated critique: "One needs to be a little bit more careful about the way one says things on the national stage." Adds Alexander: "One thing that has always impressed me about Senator Lieberman is that he is really a very conscientious and honorable man."

Just as I’m about to leave, I see Lieberman behind a glass door. I wait a moment, and introduce myself when he comes out. He’s polite, but won’t take any questions. "We’re running a little late," he says. An aide gives me information on how to catch up with Lieberman at his next event. But I realize that if I do that, I’ll miss the big Dean rally in Concord. Reluctantly, I turn around and head to the state capital.

DID THE DEAN campaign go up in flames Monday night? That’s the consensus on talk radio. Over and over and over, I hear that clip of Dean bellowing at the top of his lungs about going to this state and that state, on and on, and finally going to "Washington, DC, to take back the White House! Heee-yah!" Yes, he sounded demented. But I was watching Monday night, and he was smiling as he said it. Chalk it up to sleep deprivation. Still, the right-wing media are having a field day, and seem determined to get as much mileage out of this as they can.

The Dean rally is taking place at 4 p.m. in a huge gymnasium at the New Hampshire Technical Institute, on the outskirts of Concord. The logistics befit a candidate who was and may still be the front-runner. This is the only event at which I am asked to sign in and wear a press badge. Aides are everywhere. I talk with a guy named Alex von Rosenberg, from Cincinnati, who’s selling something called "The Original Dean Deck," a deck of cards dedicated to his political hero.

Inside, amid several hundred mostly young Deaniacs, I meet a middle-aged guy named Ken Kiehl, of Concord, a former Navy officer who’s attending his third Dean event; he says he took his daughter to a Clark rally and was unimpressed. He tells me that he saw Clark admit during a television interview that the reason he was relieved of his NATO command was that he had ordered a British commander to attack Russian troops. He jokes that at least Bush has the brains to attack countries that can’t fight back. (Actually, Clark ordered the commander to block an advance by Russian troops in Kosovo, which is close enough. "I’m not going to start World War III for you," the Brit reportedly told Clark.)

I also talk with Emma Arons, a graduate student in psychology from Manhattan, who’s come up for a week to help with the campaign. I ask her what happened to Dean in Iowa. "I think the media has been a bit unfair to him, actually," she says. She insists, though, that "there’s a lot of good energy in the Dean campaign, which is exciting."

A little after 4:30, Joan Jett and the Blackhearts launch into an energetic set, followed by a mother in her 40s who says that she, her child, and her husband subsist on some $18,000 a year. "The tax cut that I received," she says, "was $14.60." Obviously Dean is not going to back down from his criticism of the Bush tax cuts.

Dean comes on a little after 5 p.m., wearing a suit. He keeps the jacket on, perhaps a concession to the need to remain calm after his outburst the previous night. "This is not the red-meat speech that I like to give at these rallies," Dean says, explaining he’s going to offer "a pretty serious policy speech." He then proceeds to deliver more or less the same stump speech that he always does. I count five references to "Ken Lay and the boys at Enron," which is impressive for a 20-minute talk. He speaks passionately about the Bush budget deficits, fed by $3 trillion in tax cuts (for "Ken Lay and the boys," of course), cutbacks in college-tuition assistance and health care for the poor, and a host of other Republican depredations.

He also makes a point I haven’t heard anyone else make. In Vermont, he says, he began a program to intervene in troubled families, offering them help with child care, health care, job training, and parent education. The result: substantial drops in the rate of child abuse and sexual abuse. "Those kids are going to college, not prison," he says. I find myself wondering why we don’t hear more about that and less about — well, Ken Lay and the boys.

Dean has styled his campaign as a self-empowerment movement, which is why his Internet organizing efforts have been so successful. He refers to that as he wraps up. "This is not about sending me to the White House. This is about sending us to the White House," he says.

He ends to the strains of Van Morrison’s "Bright Side of the Road," greeting well-wishers for several minutes before being hustled out behind the podium.

COMPARED TO the raucous cheers I heard at Dean’s rally, the polite applause for Kerry’s policy proposals are a comedown. But this is earnest clapping, from people who are paying attention. There are lots of families here at Pembroke Academy, and lots of elderly people, too. The kind of people who vote.

At one point Kerry describes a plan to help small businesses offer health insurance to their employees. He notes that the plan has been praised by Time magazine, but for the life of me I can’t follow the ins and outs. Michael Mercier, though, has no problem understanding it. A contractor from Concord, Mercier tells me that he’s leaning toward Kerry, in part because of his stand on health care. "I like it that he’s so approachable," he tells me. "I’m trying to look across the sound bites, and I think he got through to me tonight."

But Kerry’s campaign was a flop for so long. The consensus front-runner a year ago, Kerry fell on such hard times that, in December, a Newsweek poll showed him running nationally behind the Reverend Al Sharpton. Slate’s Kerry-loathing blogger, Mickey Kaus, started a "Kerry Withdrawal Contest" (which he suspended this week). And Kerry is still capable — as he showed last week — of such politics-as-usual groaners as whacking fellow candidates Lieberman and Gephardt for supporting the Iraq-war resolution, even though he voted for the same resolution. How did Kerry go from also-ran to Comeback Kid in the space of a few weeks? Can it last?

I talk with Lorin Mulligan and her 84-year-old mother, Jean Mulligan. Mrs. Mulligan had lived in New York and New Jersey for most of her life before moving into her daughter’s home, in Henniker. Next Tuesday will be her first New Hampshire primary.

Lorin Mulligan is undecided, and skeptical about what she sees as progressive proposals from Kerry and other candidates with no explanation of how they intend to pay for them. Her mother, though, has been with Kerry for a while.

"I like Kerry," she tells me. "I feel that he’s sincere compared to the people who I’ve been listening to, and I don’t want to name names." She adds, "He is a good-looking man."

But then, sounding more pensive, she says, "I like what he stands for, and I hope he just comes through for me. I hope he doesn’t take my trust and my feelings and make me wrong."

The formal question-and-answer session is over, but Kerry is lingering, greeting all comers, seemingly determined to answer every question and sign every autograph. His weary wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, finally leaves his side, sits in a plastic-and-metal chair, and makes a call on her cell phone. By the time Kerry makes it out the door, it’s 7:30.

Former Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis, a Kerry supporter, once said — after losing the governorship and then regaining it four years later — that the rarest of all things in politics is a second chance. John Kerry has won a second chance. By next Tuesday night, we should know what he’s been able to do with it.

New Hampshire is a must-win state for Dean. If he can’t win here, he likely can’t win anywhere. But it’s pretty close to a must-win state for Kerry, too. The week after New Hampshire comes primaries in South Carolina, Missouri, Oklahoma, and Arizona, places where the Southern appeal of Wesley Clark and John Edwards is likely to play well.

And a race that looked like it was over a month ago may be just getting started.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com. Read his daily Media Log at BostonPhoenix.com.