View from the foxhole

I had hoped to have the time to post during the closing days of the campaign in New Hampshire; lack of energy turned out to be the real obstacle.

I'm not going to recap my experiences except to say that I walked a lot of streets, climbed a lot of front steps (and some back ones) and knocked on a lot of doors. I did one neighborhood three times in two days. There are some people in southern New Hampshire who probably feel they know me better than they know their neighbors. (But will they miss me now that I'm gone?)

I said that I was going off to serve as a campaign footsolder--a term that turned out to be more true than I had intended: In the last four days of my time in New Hampshire, I walked 30-40 miles. But the real story, from my perspective, was my perspective. I saw the campaign from the viewpoint of a private; what I knew of the struggle was limited to what I could see, hear and feel (like the pain in my lower back and the wet that crept through my broken-down boots).

As it happens, I've been reading Alamo in the Ardennes, by John C. McManus, a book about the early stages of the Battle of the Bulge; I now have a new appreciation of the way that the common soldier perceives the battle. In the middle of the hardest struggle, there is someone who is having a quiet war; in the middle of the greatest triumph, some grunt is being overrun by the about-to-be routed enemy. Which is why we can't all be generals, and most of us have to follow our orders and hope for the best.

The difference between me and the GI's at the Bulge--outside of the fact that I got to sleep in my own bed each night (after a 60-minute drive) and that no one was trying to kill me--was that I had a little time to see the news and scan the blogs, so I had an idea of what was happening in the world at large. Not in the campaign, of course, as NO ONE--not even Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama--knew what was really happening.

So now I'm back on familiar ground, back to the work-a-day world, and getting ready for Super Duper Tuesday on February 5th, when we here in Massachusetts will get our chance to vote.