What About John Edwards?

4:24 p.m.

Gallery

Final Arguments in New Hampshire

On the eve of New Hampshire's Jan. 8 presidential primary, the Democratic and Republican candidates made their final appeals to voters.

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LEBANON -- Edwards had way too many people turn out for the small room at Lebanon High School where he was to speak, so the crowd spilled over into the gym and listened to him on a loudspeaker. That was kind of lame (Did the Edwards team fear that it couldn't fill the gym? That a camera might pick up empty seats in the background?), and to make up for it, Edwards showed up briefly in the gym for a demonstration of his set-shot prowess.

No snark is intended when we report that he has a pretty shot -- a smooth stroke, with excellent ball rotation. He clanged a few off the back of the rim and blamed the ball ("I need a boy's ball! This is a girl's ball!"), but eventually he got warmed up and sank four in a row from just beyond foul-shot distance.

This part of New Hampshire is progressive -- it's practically Vermont, to the point that Vermonters were all over the event today. Many progressives all over New Hampshire may be thinking strategically about Tuesday's vote. Both Obama and Edwards are viewed as progressive -- and Dennis Kucinich, too -- but many voters today told me they want to make sure that Clinton doesn't win. So even if they like Edwards or Kucinich more, they might vote for Obama in hopes that he'll beat Clinton.

"I think she's a Republican in sheep's clothing," said Kate Devine, a physician in the Upper Valley (of the Connecticut River) town of Lyme. People in this area, which includes Hanover, home to Dartmouth College, "tend to vote more like Vermonters. Even though the student population of Dartmouth is very conservative, the faculty and staff is less so."

"I will not vote for Hillary Clinton," said John Corrigan, a "hard-core Democrat" in Concord. "I'm looking for the progressive alternative to Hillary Clinton. That could be Obama, or it could be Edwards."

This isn't a scientific survey, of course. And Jesse Wolfson, 22, a Yale student from Hanover who will vote Tuesday, told me he thinks the national news media have been vicious in their coverage of Clinton.

But he's voting for Edwards, for sure.

6:33 p.m.

MANCHESTER -- "Change" is so popular that even candidates who represent stasis, inertia, government paralysis, hidebound ideology are embracing it. Where are the candidates who take a stand for Steady As She Goes? Who speaks for Torpor?

Obama campaigns beneath a banner saying Change We Can Believe In. The side of Edwards's bus says Real Change Starts Now. Clinton declared on Friday that America needs not just a president who will call for change, or one who will demand change, but "a president who will produce change."

I walked into a Mitt Romney event Friday night in Manchester, and he was already heavily into change mode.

"Change! Change! And how to bring change. . . ."

The word began to take control of his tongue.

"Don't send us the same people to fill different changes -- different chairs. . . ."