Obama in New Hampshire's North Country

HANOVER, N.H. May 29, 2007 — -- For the family of Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., Memorial Day weekend was spent driving through the mountains in an RV filled with extended family.

But that RV was trailed by a phalanx of cars, vans and a bus, holding Secret Service agents, campaign staffers and members of the press. And those mountains? They were in New Hampshire — home, of course, to the nation's first primary.

For Obama, this two-day swing through New Hampshire's North Country was actually three trips in one. It was one part campaign visit, Obama's first through this more sparsely populated portion of the state; one part photo op, with made-for-television moments like an ice cream social and a walk across a covered bridge; and one part family vacation, with cousins and other relatives joining Obama's wife and two young girls in a rented RV as they drove across the state.

The weekend began Sunday afternoon in Conway, N.H., with a town hall meeting at the local high school. A crowd of more than 1,000 people came out to see Obama in person, an impressive number given the town's entire population is less than 10,000. Impressive, too, considering Obama was competing for attention with Memorial Day cookouts, the Indy 500 and a gorgeous 70-degree day in the White Mountains.

In fact, large crowds seemed to follow Obama throughout the state. On Monday, Obama spoke at a rally at Dartmouth College in Hanover before an estimated crowd of more than 5,000. Even Sunday night in Berlin, a few hundred supporters came to see Obama scoop ice cream for his wife at a park in the center of the town.

One explanation for the sizable turnout at the events, besides Obama's well-documented "rock star" appeal, may lie with the state's independent voters.

New Hampshire law allows independents to choose which party's primary they want to participate in, and the crowds may have been fueled by some of these independents coming to learn about Obama. This would be in line with a recent survey by the University of New Hampshire, which indicated that dissatisfaction with the GOP might lead as many as two-thirds of the state's independents to vote in next year's Democratic primary.