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RealClearPolitics Politics Nation Blog

By Reid Wilson (AIM: PoliticsNation)

« Clinton Mocks Hecklers | Blog Home Page | NH Crucial To Mitt, McCain »

Morning Thoughts: Rock Solid

Good Tuesday morning. The clouds are parting, the weather is warm and everything is cooperating beautifully on primary day. Here are the last-minute headlines to watch:

-- Today On The Trail: Barack Obama rallies at Dartmouth College, then at a high school in Nashua. John Edwards has a meeting with voters and an election night party in Manchester, while Hillary Clinton will meet supporters at a post-voter rally in Manchester.

-- John McCain will visit polling places and hold a party in Nashua today as fellow front-runner MItt Romney meets voters at a Manchester church, a Bedford high school, a Nashua school and at events in Salem and Derry. His election night party will be held in Bedford. Rudy Giuliani stops at his campaign headquarters, hits a senior center and a restaurant and then offers remarks in Manchester, while Mike Huckabee hits churches in Manchester and Dover, middle schools in Bedford and Manchester, an East Rochester VFW hall and a Londonderry high school, all before the post-tally rally in Manchester. Ron Paul visits polling places in Manchester and Concord before going to his party in the state capitol. Fred Thompson, meanwhile, is holding events today in Greenville, Lexington, Camden and Columbia, South Carolina.

-- The results are in! Everybody can go home now. Tiny Dixville Notch, just minutes from the Canadian birder in Northern New Hampshire, voted just after midnight, giving Obama a big win on the Democratic side and handing four of seven GOP votes to McCain. Obama won seven out of ten Democratic votes. The town is one of five, including Millsfield, Hart's Location, Ellsworth and Waterville Valley, that cast their votes just after midnight in an effort to go first and steal some of the spotlight. They don't have a very good record of picking winners, though: Wes Clark, George Bush and Bill Bradley all won here while losing the state in the primary.

-- Yesterday's big news: Hillary Clinton is not a robot. Responding to a question about the stresses and strains of the campaign trail, Clinton teared up yesterday, raising once again the difficult question of how women should act on the campaign trail. Act tough, and people use bad words to talk about you. Act nice and sweet, and people will say you're not tough enough. Clinton easily handled two hecklers in Salem last night, and she's run her campaign well enough to be near the top of the pack and to have raised more than $100 million. But no one can quite get this right yet. Wait until a woman governor runs for president, maybe?

-- The road only gets tougher from here. Several senators, who have thus far stayed neutral, are in talks with the Obama campaign about getting on board, Jackie Calmes reports, the first sign that the party is coalescing around a nominee. And the Culinary Workers' union in Las Vegas, which has yet to back a candidate, is considering an Obama endorsement as early as tomorrow, a week and a half before that state's caucuses. If Clinton hopes to win the nomination, she has to push back, hard, on several new fronts. Her window of opportunity, already tight, might be closing with even more finality.

-- Nevada will be the next Democratic primary landscape, and the American Federation of Teachers, in unusually detailed FEC filings, is already there and playing the game. The union has spent more than $150,000 on radio ads on Clinton's behalf, targeted, according to the filings' purpose lines, at women over 25 years old (see filings here and here). If that's not telegraphing one's next move, we don't know what is.

-- Mitt Romney has a new best friend, and it just so happens to be Obama. The Democrat attracts a lot of independent votes, great for the primary because it means more Republicans will make up the Republican electorate -- to McCain's detriment. Obama has also become a lightening rod on experience, with Romney saying as often as possible that he's the one who has turned things around, while Obama has not. When she came up in Republican stump speeches, Clinton was often a punch line. Romney, though, is using Obama in a more substantive way, and it's helping the Republican on both the nominating and general election contests.

-- Annoyance Of The (Year) Day: Think Iowa was bad? New Hampshire has just over 1/3rd the people of Iowa and has seen more than half the advertising revenue the Hawkeye State did. $30 million has been spent to woo Granite State voters, CNN reports, the most money coming from Romney, who's dropped $8 million, Clinton and Obama, each at $5 million, and McCain, who's spent $4 million. The ads are non-stop; Politics Nation counted seven political commercials in a row at one point. Nielson, writes James Pindell, reports a total of more than 17,000 political ads in the New Hampshire and Boston media markets alone. Where to next? Watch out, South Carolina and Nevada.