New Hampshire

I went to New Hampshire on the evening of the Iowa primaries to spend the last five days there volunteering for Obama. And I had an amazing time there. Despite last night’s disappointment, I am not discouraged.

Iowa made an Obama presidency a real possibility. Before that few people really believed it could happen. New Hampshire kept it from being inevitability.

But we tasted it. The hope is out of the bag. And you can’t stuff it back in that easily. I could see it that night in people’s eyes in Nashua, as the gathered crowd realized he was not going to win. A fierceness of passion.

We are going to have to fight for this, and fight hard. If it had happened in a gush of enthusiasm and media frenzy, it would have been too ephemeral. Here today, gone tomorrow in a blaze of glory. Nope, we have to work for this one. As Obama keeps saying – all of us have to make it happen, and we can.

But it really is up to us. He has awakened hope in so many of us who have felt disillusioned and disenfranchised, now I think it’s up to us to dust off faith and get to work!

Below is a little slide show of my five days in New Hampshire. I left my camera home, so I wouldn’t be distracted, but the scenery was so beautiful and the experience was so moving, I had to get a little point and shoot to try to chronicle it. The sweeping beauty of the landscape was nothing compared to the people. I stayed in three homes, and have never seen such hospitality. Open hearts and open doors. It was amazing, and actually quite overwhelming.

We had a little satellite office covering a few gorgeous rural precincts in western NH, close to Lebanon. No other candidate even had anybody on the ground there going door to door. We had a core of about 8 volunteers, and we spent every waking hour knocking on doors, telephoning, and standing on the median strip of the highway in the melting snow, waving signs at the oncoming traffic. That was the amazing part of the experience, a group of people of all ages, from all over the country, who literally dropped everything they were doing and came to New Hampshire to make this happen.

On the day of the primary, during morning and evening rush hour, I caught the eye of the driver of nearly every car passing by. People were honking and waving, and I was counting. I told Gary, who was standing with me that I thought we were going to break 45%. As the results began to come in, I wondered how could I have been so off in my estimation. But when we finally got the numbers, it turns out our two precincts – Grantham and Springfield got 47 and 50% respectively.

Here’s a taste of what it was like:

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