MANCHESTER, N.H. — If Joe Biden had time to talk to every voter one by one, maybe he could charm his way back to the top of this presidential race.
If the former vice president can’t do that in a place as tiny as New Hampshire, he’s finished.
On the weekend before Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, I watched Biden emerge from a day of crisis talks with strategists to deliver a carefully crafted speech from a teleprompter to a crowd packed into a downtown Manchester theater. He took scripted shots at Bernie Sanders and Pete Buttigieg, who had knocked him on his heels in Iowa, and at Donald Trump, the Republican incumbent. He invoked his family’s tragedies and a lifetime of having persevered — which he twice misread as “preserved.”
Only late in the speech, when Biden stepped away from the prompter and spoke emotionally about the need to “take back America and move it forward,” did I hear the sizzle of his his once-reliable oratorical fastball.
Only after the speech, as he worked the rope line, did I sense the basic charm and decency that makes it so bittersweet to have to root against the 77-year-old winning the Democratic nomination.
The chance to assess Biden up close was a reminder of why the half-century-old tradition of starting the voting for parties’ presidential nominations with contests in Iowa and New Hampshire is valuable, never mind complaints about the process, amplified by the recent Iowa caucuses vote-counting debacle.
It’s why, every four years, I and a group of sportswriter friends and their families from around the country go to New Hampshire for the few days before the Tuesday voting.
Without reporters’ credentials or campaign affiliations, we dash to candidates’ events across a state whose population equals San Diego’s, listening to their appeals and, crucially, seeking to weigh their handshakes.
Since 1988, we have shaken the hands of more than 50 contenders, including presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama.
Trump, man of the people, doesn’t really want to meet any and didn’t do handshakes when we some of us saw him in 2016 at a primary-eve rally at the Manchester hockey arena.
Speaking of the 45th president: It must be coincidence that best handshakes over the years include Trump antagonists John McCain, Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton (all stopped, focused on you, wanted to talk), and the worst were Trump allies Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich (no stop, eye contact or conversation).
That the voters at campaign events often have better access to the candidates than reporters do was underscored when I covered politics for this newspaper for three years. At one Sanders rally at Long Beach City College last August, my seat at the press table afforded no view of the speaker.
This was the first chance for me and my friends to see Biden, whose 1988 and 2008 presidential runs ended before the first-in-the-nation primary.
His creaky performance showed us why, although Biden leads national Democratic polls, voters in Iowa saw him and sent him to a surprisingly weak fourth-place finish in last week’s caucuses behind Buttigieg, Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and just ahead of Amy Klobuchar.
Taking in a rally the next day by the hyperkinetic and quick-witted Warren, who’s also in her 70s, made Biden seem ancient.
But face-to-face Biden could, well, preserve his chances. He is up there with McCain, Romney and any Clinton.
When one of my friends mentioned her sister’s name to Biden, he exclaimed, “She saved my life!” The sister was the ER nurse who rode with Biden in a four-hour ambulance ride to brain-aneurysm surgery in 1988. Biden brought my friend and her daughter backstage at the Rex Theatre in Manchester and had her dial her sister so he could talk with her right then.
Biden let me videotape him delivering a personal pitch for the vote of a friend of mine who couldn’t make it to New Hampshire this year. I wouldn’t have asked Bernie Sanders to do that.
For a visitor from California, the New Hampshire primary never ceases to amaze. Back home, campaigns are run in TV studios. Here, they’re done in the flesh. You can literally get a feel for the famously tactile Biden.
It would be fitting if the pressure to reorganize the nominating process resulted in dime-store Iowa and New Hampshire losing their leadoff spots just as expert retail politicians like Biden are fading out.
But we’d lose something if that happened: the chance to look our would-be presidents in the eye.
It should be preserved.
Kevin Modesti is a sportswriter for this and other Southern California News Group papers, and a former politics reporter and editorial board member.