NEW HAMPSHIRE: DECISION 2008

As part of our guest blogger series, IBP is honored to present Claude Augern, for years the host of NBC's popular Sunday Morning show, "Augern's America". As he did for over twenty years on his talk show, Augern will be seeking the amusing, unsual and eccentric characters that flit around the edges of important American events.

I am always seized by a wistfulness upon leaving a place, whether I have been there for one day or ten years. And so, wistfulness visits me again as I arrive at the airport, preparing to leave New Hampshire, unsure if I will ever return.

And walking through the airport, I am surprised to encounter one Hugh Farlin, laying across three plastic chairs, covered by a newspaper blaring the headline of a McCain victory. His one moment of glory having come twenty-two years earlier at the Democratic Convention in New York City, when he was shown holding aloft a sign proclaiming, "Grits and Fritz Give Me The Sh**s", Hugh Farlin had traveled to New Hampshire to support his chosen candidate, Mitt Romney. Hugh Farlin believes that the ease with which "Mitt" can be rhymed with a common barnyard expression for feces, gives him his best opportunity to replicate his crowning moment of 1976.

But on this morning, following another Romney defeat, Hugh Farlin is not ebullient.