Away Game

Anyway, it's all shorthand for possibility, and for a degree of ambition that's too awesome to speak of, at least this early. "Okay, so I want to apply for the most important job in the country?" Warner says with more than a hint of disbelief in his voice. "Or, arguably, the world?"

He shakes his head, squints his eyes, strokes his ample Adam's apple with his thumb.

"There's an otherworldly quality to the early visits," says Democratic strategist Jim Jordan, who ran John Kerry's presidential campaign for much of the pre-voting period. The trips are also fun and relaxed, compared with what could come later. There are no attack ads, no great scrutiny or reporters asking Warner whether his big teeth are real -- at least until last Thursday night.

"Yes, they're real," Warner says as his van heads out of Boston for New Hampshire following a talk to a group of student Democrats at Harvard.

"Horse teeth," Warner calls them.

The governor allows that he's had his teeth whitened. He then spends the next few seconds staring bug-eyed at his communications director, as if this brush of dental candor might somehow blow the whole thing up before it even starts.

Or has it started yet?

* * *

It's never too early for White House hopefuls to come to New Hampshire and flatter the locals about what Warner calls the state's "special sense of stewardship and responsibility" in the presidential process. Indeed, the first job of any candidate here is to assure voters that the single biggest peril facing the universe -- more than war, moral bankruptcy or snakeheads -- is that someone might take away the Granite State's first-primary-in-the-nation status.

At which point democracy may as well cease to exist and, more to the point, presidential candidates would cease to genuflect before the 200 or so Democratic activists who are now crammed into a Manchester function room to hear Warner.

"We will be first, by golly," shouts state Sen. Lou D'Allesandro, who precedes Warner at the lectern. "And if we're not first, the nation is in trouble."

There are cheers, war whoops.