Christina Bellantoni of the Washington Times is on the campaign trail in New Hampshire with Senator Clinton. The set up is that Clinton drew a much larger crowd than Obama in the same venue yesterday. But things are not always what they seem:

Reporters who walked into this Nashua high school today were immediately struck by the crowd; there are visibly more people here for Sen. Hillary Clinton than were here for Sen. Barack Obama yesterday in the same location…The Clinton crowd was loud and boisterous and their foot-stomping was thunderous. Many of them were also from Massachusetts…Of the 7 people I interviewed, three said they had taken advantage of the short drive to come see both Clinton and Obama in the area in advance of the Feb. 5 Massachusetts primary. But the others said they were Clinton volunteers who came up to canvass on her behalf this weekend.

Serap Sankoh, a biostatistician from Acton, Mass., said she had been actively recruited to attend and wave signs wildly by the Clinton campaign. “I got the telephone calls not last night but the night before and I’m a die-hard supporter, so I made the drive,” she said…

When the event ended I talked to some of the out-of-staters, including Julia Fuchs, 65 and a recent graduate student. She was about to board one of the buses back to New York after spending two days in the Granite State for Clinton…”We are crazy about her. We came here to stump for her, they told me where to go,” she said. “The campaign paid for everything.”

Fuchs also told me that one questioner who asked about student loans during the event was one of the volunteers from New York…I just spoke to the student loans questioner, Dominique Wilburn, who told me she actually is an intern in Clinton’s New York senate office. Wilburn, a student who lives in East New Jersey, was quick to say she was no plant and that she wants to know about how the candidates will help the youth. “It was an issue the candidates haven’t really talked about,” she said. “She didn’t know who I was until afterwards when someone told her a bunch of us came from New York.”

The press is so disrespectful. Of course a questioner who works in the Senator’s office isn’t a plant. Perish the thought. How ridiculous even to think such a thing.

UPDATE

A possible backstory appears in the NYT today:

Former President Bill Clinton has been drawing sleepy and sometimes smallish crowds at big venues in the state that revived his presidential campaign in 1992. He entered to polite applause and rows of empty seats at the University of New Hampshire on Friday. Several people filed out midspeech, and the room was largely quiet as he spoke, with few interruptions for laughter or applause. He talked about his administration, his foundation work and some about his wife…

Maybe the sluggish day was a blip. It was, in fairness, the day after Mrs. Clinton finished third in the Iowa caucuses, behind Senator Barack Obama of Illinois and John Edwards of North Carolina…But there was a similarly listless aura at the previous stop, in Rochester. And again, on Saturday in Bow, at just the sort of high school gym that the master campaigner used to blow out. Only about 225 showed up in Bow — about one-third the capacity of the room — to hear Mr. Clinton…

So Senator Clinton is outdrawing President Clinton, however that is arranged. And maybe that is a good thing. As the Times rather coyly noted: “From time to time, Mr. Clinton has generated the wrong kind of attention, like when he said in Iowa that he had been against the invasion of Iraq from the beginning, a statement that did not seem to be in line with his public utterances at the time.” What a gentle remonstrance for a whopper of a lie.

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