Just got back from the Hillary Clinton return to New Hampshire rally at the Nashua airport. The hangar where it was held wasn't huge, and was made even smaller by what seemed like a gigantic stage, but it was full with a mix of young and old, men, women and kids (I was surprised how young the crowd was, actually.) I wouldn't say there was a real buzz of excitement in the air as the crowd anticipated the Clintons' arrival, but as signs were passed out (emblazoned with one word: READY) and as chants were led ("Ready to Change, Ready to Lead!",) the excitement did grow until the place erupted as all of the Clintons were introduced.

Bill took the microphone briefly to introduce Hillary and said he's never been more proud of her than during her speech last night. He also said they got in at 4:30am last night, "my girls look great, don't you think!?" Huge applause. Oh yeah, and he got in a little dig at Iowa: "New Hampshire is going to be given the chance to prove that you are the first primary."

Hillary Clinton took the stage and I have to say, you'd never know she didn't win last night. The word unflappable comes to mind. The event was half rally, half townhall meeting where she, after making the case for herself generally, addressed her solutions to issues from bringing the troops home, to healthcare to ending our dependence on foreign oil and seemed to have a full stump speech for each issue. It was actually very impressive.

The case for her candidacy that she's making breaks down to two questions: 1. "Who will be the best president on day one?" and 2. "Who will best be able to withstand the Republican attack machine to get elected in the first place?" Nothing we haven't heard before, but the framing felt different. There was MUCH more change rhetoric and a lot less experience rhetoric, but the subtext (and sometimes the text) of the entire event was very much about experience. As the chant said, it's about being READY to lead and so she is asking New Hampshire, actually, challenging New Hampshire, to scrutinize the track records of both her and Barack Obama (yes, from her perspective, she has one obstacle to the nomination and one alone) to judge who'll bring about change in the future by looking at the change they've brought in the past. In other words, if the Clinton camp has anything to say about it, we may be in for far more scrutiny of Obama's record.

One thing Clinton made a point of addressing during the event is her electability, an issue that is incredibly important for her to dilute as a concern for voters. Despite what the media would have you believe, Obama's victory last night wasn't entirely about change, it was also about electability -- many Iowans feared going for Clinton would be a repeat of their 2004 decision to choose experience only to find the candidate was eminently beatable after all and I get the sense that people are really starting to worry about the "I can never vote for Hillary" crowd. So she played up that she's been "the most vetted, the most investigated and it turns out, the most innocent." (Again, a reference to her experience without saying the word.) She also boasted of her ability to win over Republicans and Independents in New York. I suspect Clinton will be addressing this much more over the next 5 days. Also expect her to co-opt some of Obama's post-partisan language -- today she actually said she doesn't like "red state/blue state" language, "we are one country..." which seemed a rather brazen effort to appropriate his rhetoric.

OK, off to an Obama rally, more later...

There's more...