Photo: Concord Monitor

I hope Hagel gets into the race. He's got that maverick, straight-talking, principled persona that New Hampshire voters just can't get enough of. He reminds us of John McCain - a point that a Concord Monitor reporter raised:

At one point in the interview, Hagel demurred when asked to lay out the differences between himself and close friend Sen. John McCain, whose 2000 presidential campaign he co-chaired. It was the only question he didn't answer.

"Nebraskans can be tricked pretty easily by you fancy New Hampshirites," he joked.

Monitor Editor Mike Pride aggregates coverage of the Hagel visit on his outstanding blog this morning. Pride, by the way, is one of the most experienced and thoughtful commentators around when it comes to the New Hampshire primary. He's worth reading every day.

Here's something you didn't know about New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson: he holds the Guinness record for shaking the most hands in a day - almost 8500.

So it wasn't a surprise that Richardson, dressed mostly in green and marching in a St. Patrick's Day parade over the weekend, held the parade up for several blocks while he worked his magic.

The hope of environmental groups here is that the 2008 New Hampshire primary will give them a chance they won't find nearly anywhere else. The primary's door-by-door town-by-town campaign style is perfect for forcing candidates from both parties to focus on fixing the nation's disastrous energy policy.

The idea is to organize the activists, the ones who show up for events in the living rooms and the library basements, and the candidates will respond.

Too soon to say whether that will work. In fact, the biggest news from Richardson's visit was that he endorsed holding another caucus ahead the New Hampshire primary -- a cardinal sin in the Granite State.