Mark Alexander

Hillary Clinton's supporters have a dream. They see current Iowa frontrunner Barack Obama limping into a shocking third place finish in the Jan. 3rd caucus and then standing before a crowd of youthful campaign volunteers with a hand-held microphone. 

With an eye on the presidential polls in Iowa and New Hampshire and South Carolina where their candidate is competitive, Obama supporters rallied at the Masonic Temple in Newark on Saturday in preparation for the February 5th primary in New Jersey - where Obama is not competitive.

At least not today. Not right now.

That could change depending on what happens in the earlier primaries, and for a presidential candidacy built on change, a subject Obama's supporters figure they know well, they like the odds.

"This is going to come down to what kind of organization we have in key states around the country," Mayor Cory Booker told a crowd of 150. "New Jersey is probably one of the bellwether states in terms of where this primary is going to go."

Michelle Obama speaks to voters in New Hampshire
MANCHESTER, NH - Compared to Jersey, it’s edge of the world country.

Snow-capped Monadnock in the distance between Manchester and Keene sends a wordless message that the human hurly burly is but a small piece of the action. A headline in the Union-Leader tells of a hunter who’s still lost after several days and the sense is this is commonplace in New Hampshire. Human star power that blows through on the way to the presidency has nothing on the constancy of the hills, and the mountain.

Today the student center crawls with Secret Service personnel at Keene College, where kids bundled into backpacks and ballcaps trudge from edifice to noble edifice in the dreadful cold.

The students prepare to hear from Michelle Obama, the 43-year old wife of the presidential candidate, who’s leading in Iowa over Sen. Hillary Clinton by a four-point margin, and trailing her by six points in New Hampshire, according to Washington Post/ABC News polls. When Bill Clinton ran for president in 1991, he wore out his voice calling for change. Now he’s the institutional old sage and his wife is the political insider, while Obama the upstart calls for change, and his wife amplifies the message.

If you're one of those people who signed for the mailing lists of all the presidential candidates, you might have noticed that Barack Obama was the only one to send out an e-mail to their New Jersey list today reminding them that today is Election Day. 

Boom. He’s here.

That was the way Barack Obama’s New Jersey State Director, Mark Alexander, described tonight’s low-dollar Obama fundraiser at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark. About 1,300 people turned out for the event, where students paid $15 for admission, while everyone else paid $25.

 Sen. Barack Obama campaigns in New Jersey last year for Sen. Bob Menendez

New Jersey may look like deep Hillary Clinton territory, but the Barack Obama campaign says it’s starting to lay groundwork here.

National Campaign Manager David Plouffe and newly named New Jersey State Director Mark Alexander held a conference call today to announce the creation of a campaign office in West Orange, which will open next week, and the transfer and hiring of new staff.

Barack Obama’s campaign is strongly disputing an Inside Edge report that Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Alexander was fired as their national Policy Director.  The campaign announced this week that Alexander was returning to New Jersey to direct Obama’s state operation for the February 5 Democratic presidential primary.

“The post by Wally Edge this morning is completely inaccurate,” said Obama spokesperson Jen Psaki.  “We have relocated several senior staffers to key February 5th states, including our Deputy Political Director, our mid-western political director to Missouri, and western field director to California and so on.”

Mark Alexander, fired this week as the national Policy Director of Barack Obama's campaign for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, is among the more popular professors at Seton Hall Law School, according to the website ratemyprofessors.com.

Alexander was given a consolation prize -- he'll be Obama's campaign manager in New Jersey.  One interesting test to see if Alexander is really running the campaign: will he resume teaching at the law school in Janaury, a month before the New Jersey primary.

Some circumstantial evidence that Barack Obama has made a final decision to seek the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination: Seton Hall Law Professor Mark Alexander told about five dozen students in his Constitutional Law class yesterday that they should expect a new Professor to take over in about three weeks. Alexander told his students that he will serve as Policy Director for the Obama campaign; he held a similar post for Bill Bradley in 2000.