I'm sitting in Jitters Café on Elm Street in Manchester. The muffins are warm and the temperature inside here is even warmer. But it's cold as hell outside - hard-to-breath, please-make-it-stop kinda cold.
For a while I was the only customer in here, and by sheer coincidence, the guy who works here just told me Dean is supposed to come to this very coffee shop. (Those campaign gods do smile.) Dean's second field office in Manchester, which opened just this month, is two doors down from Jitters. I suspect they'll move a bunch of volunteers over here, and bring Dean and his busload of people and press in for a warm drink before their noon event at the Palace Theatre about four blocks from here.
The Palace is a local institution. Its art deco exterior and lightbulb-ringed marquee harken back to a grander time, when the Palace paid witness to performances ranging from the Marx Brothers to Houdini. The shiny-new, green-glass Verizon Wireless Arena is about a half mile down Elm; Britney Spears will be performing in early April, doing her own version of Houdini-like, on-stage contortionism.
I missed Dean's opening event in Nashua because I'm staying way north, in Concord. (And by way north, of course, that means about 1 hour away in this all-too-compact southern portion of the Granite State.) But for the rest of the day I'm gonna follow Dean, because today is D-Day for Dean.
Yes, the campaign has ample money and other resources, and could continue deep into February and even March without turning things around from the Iowa collapse. But in my opinion, Dean needs a solid second here tomorrow, and at least one, if not two wins next week. You cannot go oh-for-nine to start a presidential race and persist on money alone. If that were the case, Steve Forbes would still be running against Bush. (And though Forbes is no Dean, Forbes did finish second in Iowa.)
After the Palace Theatre event, Dean heads east to the University of New Hampshire, in Durham, for a late afternoon rally expected to be the largest event of the day. Following that, he heads just down the road from Durham a few miles, to Exeter, for a town hall meeting at Phillips Exeter Academy. (Where, it seems, half of the Kerry campaign staff went to prep school...but more later on the blue-bloody, merino wool sweater and Burberry scarf nature of the Kerry crowd.)
The Dean people are now massing on the corner of Elm and Bridge streets, just outside the window, for what appears to be a visibility greeting as the Dean bus arrives. He should be here momentarily.