Two gorgeous days in New Hampshire

Today and yesterday in New Hampshire have been gorgeous for The Campaign To Change America.

I was contacted early in the week to be involved in a conference call ahead of Wednesday's debate with John Edward's campaign strategists. It wasn't just them and me to be sure - but I gather there were less than 200 of us across the country on this call. How did I rate this special treatment? Not for much, I would say. I am a captain in our local One Corps chapter - along with Dustin Blythe. He and I have certainly put effort into the campaign. But I think we were invited because we identified ourselves as wanting to make a difference. That really seems to be enough.

In the interest of full disclosure: I am a political junkie, and this is the first campaign I have been absolutely fired up about. I now understand evangelism. So...

The call was so cool. We didn't hear from unknown operatives. Instead, the first speaker was none other than David Bonior, the National Campaign Manager. I'm sure most of you know the Hon. David Bonior, former House Majority Whip from Michigan as a tireless supporter of progressive causes for decades. What you may not know is that he holds his position with the Edwards campaign (unpaid), despite his determination to retire from politics. The mood that surrounds this campaign is that it's finally time to do something!

We got a real clear idea of the strategy and our assets in the first four states. A couple things that stood out was that although Senators Clinton and Obama have spent over 4 million dollars on television ads in Iowa recently, our lead in the polls had not diminished. The second thing that caught my attention was that Senator Edwards had quietly accumulated more African American elected official endorsements in South Carolina than Clinton and Obama combined.

So, John Edwards has real strength in three of the four early states - strong union support in Nevada - but New Hampshire seems challenging. Enter two gorgeous days.

In the debate at Dartmouth, he looked like The President. He was calm, clear and unflappable. No analyst I heard claimed anything less than a fantastic outing for him. None.

So, how do you follow that? Today, he was at the University of New Hampshire for a MySpace/MTV dialogue. There was a large audience on site, but many people - including me - watched online. The online viewers were offered the opportunity to rate his responses to individual questions and eventually his overall responses.

He did pretty well. In the end, the overall favorable vote was roughly 93%.

I love the smell of democracy - it smells like victory.

Don Wheeler