Democratic Dispatches

Explain your stands on the war in Iraq, whether gays and lesbians should be allowed to marry.

Tell us how you can possibly win against George W. Bush in November when you’re already under attack now.

And why didn’t you go to the Every Woman Counts Forum at Dartmouth College on Sunday; Howard Dean did.

Admiration for John F. Kerry is starting to give way to edginess on the New Hampshire campaign trail.

The Massachusetts senator has sped from underdog to frontrunner in just over a week, and found himself on Monday, the day before the primary, alternately challenged and cheered.

“I really appreciate your coming out early in the morning like this, dreadfully early in the morning like this,” said a flagging Kerry in Portsmouth.

It was his first of seven events, two helicopter rides and hours in a bumpy bus.

At 8 a.m. he was already running late.

Every detail was proof of a hard fight’s final hours, as Kerry reached out to anyone who would listen in hopes of a second victory in a week after the Iowa caucuses.

There were the deep circles under his eyes, the rasp in his voice. The teenage volunteer who passed out on stage as Kerry spoke, felled by the hot lights.

There was the rolling chat aboard the campaign bus with four undecided voters, who jumped from tax policy to Kerry’s pet canaries and back again to global warming as a clutch of photographers clicked away.

There was the walk-around in tiny downtown Rochester where the ladies at Trinkets, Treasures & More swooned: “He touched you!” “He hugged me!” “Bring it on, John!”

Then there were Kerry’s long, loopy answers to the inquisitive voters’ long, loopy questions.

His excuse was a deep fatigue, the price of a month of hard campaigning first in Iowa, now New Hampshire.

Theirs? Well, on Wednesday all the candidates will be gone, and this is the last time voters here can get a word in edgewise.

A grandmother at Keene State College told Kerry she admired his courage, coming back from Vietnam and then standing up against that war.

She’d heard him talk on “60 Minutes” Sunday, was impressed, and liked what she heard from him on Monday.

“If you were elected president, would you be supportive or proactive on Dennis Kucinich’s Department of Peace?” she asked, referring to the Ohio congressman’s proposal for such an agency.

“I think the Department of Peace ought to be the White House and the president,” Kerry began, and he was off on a discourse.

One Vietnam veteran told Kerry -- and the 500 men and women in the Keene audience -- that he was “horrified” when the United States went to war in Iraq. Kerry, he insisted, had been “conned by the administration” into voting for the resolution that gave Bush the go-ahead to send in troops.

It wasn’t Kerry’s first query about the war, nor his last.

“I voted not specifically to go to war. I voted for a process,” he began.

Kerry’s ensuing five-minute response took him from Vietnam through the Philippines and the killing fields of Cambodia before landing the candidate back in chilly New Hampshire and the issue at hand:

“If you think I would have gone to war the way George Bush did,” he said, “don’t vote for me.”