"Jan. 26, 2004 | NASHUA, N.H. -- John Edwards was speaking in a junior high school gym crammed with supporters and media, and he started off with a kind of apology. Elizabeth, his wife, would have to leave the rally early, he said, to head down the hall and talk to "the hundreds of people who couldn't get in here."
About an hour later, Wesley Clark, speaking not far away at another gym with an almost identical setup -- bleachers, pulled-up basketball backboards, etc. -- seemed equally regretful. "I'm sorry there were 300 people or 500 that couldn't get in," he said.
For the record, there were actually fewer people shut out of the Clark event. But the fact that these trailing candidates are creating fire hazards wherever they go demonstrates that there's a lot more to the picture here than the marquis Kerry vs. Dean event. Because of the unprecedented primary schedule this year, Clark, Edwards and even Joe Lieberman are arousing interest on the ground that isn't necessarily clear from the polls, which generally show John Kerry with a lead and Howard Dean trailing.
The compressed primary calendar, which has seven states holding contests on Feb. 3, has only made things seem more competitive. For the moment, each of the major candidates has hope that he can lose in New Hampshire and still hit the electoral jackpot a week later in the season's first big Tuesday, which features seven contests spread from Delaware and South Carolina in the East to North Dakota, Missouri and Oklahoma in the middle of the country, to New Mexico and Arizona in the Southwest."
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/01/26/newhampshire/index.htmlI really think the calendar for the primaries might be too different
this year to go by previous years. And we have feverish desire to
get rid of chimpy. And an unusually strong field of candidates.
Wild.
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