STEVE INSKEEP, Host:
NPR's Linda Wertheimer reports on some primary tradition.
(SOUNDBITE OF CROWD NOISE)
LINDA WERTHEIMER: Concord is the state capital and on the last day of campaigning, there was a party going on in front of the state house. It was warm, almost spring like. There were crowds of partisans waving signs, car horns honking, buses bringing candidates and reporters, a snowman demonstrating against global warming. It was not always so. Cathy Mayer(ph) was taking in the scene in Concord this morning. She said her first primary was 1976, she worked in a hairdressing shop in Peterborough and she met her first presidential candidate, quietly trolling for voters in diners, and mills, and beauty shops.
CATHY MAYER: We came in to a shop and everybody - because there was a radio station down below, and the people in the shop said who is he, and I said, he's Jimmy Carter. And he's going to be the next president, and then he was.
WERTHEIMER: Jimmy Carter was the first president in recent times to successfully use New Hampshire as a catapult into the White House. Candidates have since followed his lead. Theresa Rosenberger is a lobbyist for AARP. She moved here 20 years ago just in time to see the comeback kid make his comeback.
THERESA ROSENBERGER: My first primary was 1992 and that was when Bill Clinton was running the first time against George Bush, and I saw it from a very different perspective.
WERTHEIMER: Paula Rogers(ph) also had a different view of her first primary. She was a little girl.
PAULA ROGERS: Captain Eisenhower and Stevenson...
WERTHEIMER: That's the farthest I can go. With that have been key (unintelligible)? I can't remember either.
ROGERS: Maybe, I don't know. But it was Captain Eisenhower I remember particularly.
WERTHEIMER: What did it feel like then?
ROGERS: Well, I was a child. So I'm not yet sure exactly what it felt like. But I do remember a lot of radio coverage. I do remember people visiting New Hampshire. I remember something about a chicken and I can't remember whether it was (unintelligible), but it became part of the campaign story.
WERTHEIMER: Paula Rogers is a prominent lawyer now in Concord. Theresa Rosenberger worries that just five days between Iowa and New Hampshire means late deciders won't have private time with candidates.
ROSENBERGER: In the past, you would have time between Iowa and New Hampshire, so you really could go sit down with a candidate, see him again in living rooms or groups of a hundred. And you really felt like you knew him now. It's so concentrated you're in on the debate.
WERTHEIMER: Brian Shea owns the Barley House. This week, he invented a healthy low-fat burger named for a certain weight-conscious candidate.
BRIAN SHEA: So we put it on a whole wheat bun, fresh baby spinach, fresh tomato and fried pickle. You know, you also have the option of getting the bison burger which you can take it up to another level.
WERTHEIMER: Dr. Roger Brooks is the principal.
ROGER BROOKS: I believe that we owe every child in Beaver Meadow school a peak experience that will really shape who he or she becomes in life.
WERTHEIMER: Look out for some of them to become news anchors. Brooks has teams of news-gathering fifth graders who'd been brought to the process all school year. Zac Spiegel(ph) is a so-called kid reporter for scholastic magazine who dove between the legs of larger journalists to get to the front and get a story.
SPIEGEL: My second one with Barack Obama. That was probably my - it's probably my biggest story because a lot, a lot, a lot of people like him. John McCain was my biggest like writing story, but it was pretty huge.
WERTHEIMER: Linda Wertheimer, NPR News, New Hampshire.
INSKEEP: And so that's the past and here's the future. You can hear NPR's special coverage and analysis of today's New Hampshire's primaries tonight starting eight o'clock Eastern Time on many NPR stations and at npr.org.