In his beautiful, soaring concession speech, Obama mentioned the town of Lebanon for a reason. I was with him in Lebanon the day before — and what we saw there was a defining moment in the campaign. It surprised him, his staff members, the Secret Service on board the campaign bus, even the bus driver. We turned the corner toward the event and saw hundreds of people lined up through the streets of the town just to see him, to feel his aura and to later say that they'd done it — they'd been there.  There were hundreds more than the venue could hold, and they stood there anyway, and kept coming. Obama, overwhelmed by the overflow crowd, insisted on an outdoor speech before his indoor speech. This much is important, and should be said: Any journalist covering any candidate that day, in that town, would have come away as I did after seeing those people,  saying something akin to the old song lyric, "Something's happening here." A colleague of mine contends Obama got caught up in the history he was making. I don't think that's quite fair. The candidate didn't change his message as much as Iowa changed the way we heard it.

That day, I saw people embrace Obama the way people embrace loved ones returning from foreign battlefields. I saw people with small children, brought along simply so their parents could years later tell them, to the point of predictable annoyance, "You were there."  Losing in New Hampshire may well make Obama a better candidate. While it's the kind of thing that is always said at times like these by those of us whose names have never appeared on a ballot, I think it might just be true in this case.