I have driven up to New Hampshire a few times over the last few weeks in order to support my candidate. This is stuff that I have not done since I was a teenager: stuffing envelopes, making calls, writing letters. The last time I was doing this for a woman running for a mayorship in southern California. At this level campaign are both compelling and boring. Each person to whom you talk or write could potentially be affected, either way, by what you say and how you say it. On one of my first few calls I thought I would be smart, telling to a woman that the campaign would not bother her, that the campaign was only interesting in knowing about her voting tendencies. Stupid, stupid, stupid. It sounded to her as if I were intruding on her rights to keep her politics secret. And I did not make the same mistake again.

Most of my time at the campaign has been consumed with letter writing. If my phone calling created a mini-disaster, my "endorsement letter" was popular enough that the office manager wanted to turn it into a template for other, less articulate endorsers. He even explored ways to mass produce my original, but he could not get the copies to look as if they had been handwritten. So what do I do when I go up? Write, and write, and write and write and write (no, it is not the Itchy and Scratchy Show.) The campaign wants handwritten letters in order to add more intimacy to the message. Meanwhile, my hands are falling off.