The Dems in the land of Dunkin Donuts.

Elm Street, the main drag in Manchester, NH, is the unofficial capital of the campaign for the Democratic Party nomination. If New Hampshire is the key battleground in the race, then this is the place, because this is where the headquarters of most all the campaigns are located. And therein lies one of the first and most important ironies of the election.

Like pretty much every major New England town outside of the Route 128 ring around Boston, Manchester is a burned-out, post-industrial shithole of a city, a rotting hulk of an ex-mill town. If you've ever been to Lowell or Fall River or New Bedford, you know what the deal is here: big brick mills and factories that have been emptied out and converted to condos or malls or offices, usually at about 45 percent capacity. Huge chunks of the city are weatherbeaten, asymmetrical homes with cracking paint and rusted chain-link fences, and culture is a pretty steady mix of sub shops, karaoke and sports bars, mullets and classic rock. In 95 percent of the city, the big shows in town at any given moment, year-round, will be booze first and then Red Sox, Pats and Bruins games on tv. Only in one part of town does the pattern break, once every four years.

Like all burned-out American cities, Manchester has one showcase strip, complete with a few glitzy corporate-ish restaurants (like the Margaritas Mexican bar, a popular hangout for campaign staffers), a museum or two, an expensive and mostly useless concert arena (the Verizon Wireless civic arena, on Elm St.), the obligatory internet cafe and a selection of shops and boutiques for worthless knick-knacks and other trash. In Manchester, this area is basically up and down Elm St. and then a few blocks over on a strip that runs along the Merrimack River, where the hollowed-out mill stores/condos are located. You'll find nice cars parked in these areas, SUVs with old Gore or McCain stickers on them (as well as the occasional vintage Volvo with the Dukakis sticker), and everything is in good repair, eminently reputable and fit for the eyes of visitors.

This is where all the campaigns are. Gephardt, Lieberman, Edwards and Kucinich are on Elm St., while Kerry and Dean have bigger, swankier pads in the mills on the river. Braun and Sharpton aren't here yet, and Clark's offices to date are in Dover, although an Elm St. location is expected soon.

It's like two different worlds. On Elm St., the campaign is the big show, and at any minute you can run into a staffer who'll pass along that day's latest campaign gossip, like the resignation of Kerry advisor Chris Lehane, or the defection of his Manchester press secretary, Kym Spell, who reportedly split for Clark's campaign last week. If there's a campaign event in town it's almost always in this area. But venture 200 yards from Elm St. where the actual people live, and you'll be hard-pressed to find a single person who's heard of any of the candidates. I did find one, a 29-year-old named Chris Keith with long hair and a Slayer shirt. We were in Flo's Bar, a horrific dive a stone's throw from Elm that reportedly really fills up on the first of the month, when everyone has their AFDC checks. Keith is a Dean supporter, and we talked politics animatedly for about a half-hour. I asked him if he could imagine someone like Dean or Dennis Kucinich coming in to Flo's.

"Shit, no," he said. "This is the worst fucking place in the state!"

We talked for a while longer, but then he got bored and split to go trawling for crack whores. By the time I left the place, he'd apparently found one. She was in her 50s and looked like a bog mummy. This is probably the way the election works for most of New Hampshire?a brief hassle in between Sox games and other business.

Some outsider candidate could probably score a lot of points just by setting up camp in a real neighborhood here. But none of them do. Headquarters has to be the fake place with no people. This is a theme that starts to jump out at you after a while on the campaign trail: that the candidates are all very conscious of their locations. The backgrounds for their appearances are always Rockwell-esque portraits of rustic America, complete with statues, flags, people in work clothes, diner counters, etc. They never visit ghettos. When they want that effect, they simply imply it by fiat, a point made most starkly by the fake graffiti the Dean people concocted for the background of the candidate's "Sleepless Summer" speech in Bryant Park in New York.

I first arrived in Manchester on a Sunday. The Patriots were playing the Eagles between four and seven. The entire city naturally shut down during those hours?except on the fake strip. At the Institute of Arts and Sciences, just off Elm St., candidate Joe Lieberman held a "town hall meeting" at six p.m., which in real time translated to just after halftime (the game ran late that day). And at that fake location Lieberman held his fake event, a "town hall" meeting full of the kind of people who don't actually exist anywhere else in the city. You have not experienced weirdness until you've seen 350 yuppies erupting in spontaneous applause for a Jewish mother who cries on cue.

Family plays a big role in the New Hampshire campaign. The candidates have to maintain a constant presence here or they're sunk, but many of them are in Congress or on the road elsewhere for much of the campaign. Therefore you see a lot of relatives at campaign functions. At an abortion-rights conference I went to later in the week, only Dean showed up in person, but there were three daughters present: Rebecca Lieberman, Vanessa Kerry and Chrissy Graham McCullough. Christy Gephardt was supposed to be here as well, but she missed her plane. Matt Gephardt, Dick's son, was in the area just a few days before, rallying the volunteers.

But no one does with family what Joe Lieberman does. The Lieberman road show is designed as a peculiar kind of cathartic theater, almost like a political Iron John retreat, where men get together and cry in front of images of their mothers.

The Lieberman town hall meeting was a tremendous spectacle. In the center of the room full of people, Lieberman's mother, Marcia Lieberman, sat quietly kvelling, a proud smile on her face. Meanwhile, rushing past her back and forth was Manchester mayor Bob Baines, who was here to get a little face time for the national media. Baines was facing a primary vote in a few days, and I was worried for a while that he was going to break an ankle rushing to shake the hands of everyone in the room. The deranged smile plastered on his face brought to mind an Alaskan king crab.

The show really got started when Marcia Lieberman took the mic to introduce her son. Dame Lieberman, the height of a trash can, looks like Ernest Borgnine in a pearl necklace. I was too far away to see her makeup closely, but from a distance her face looked like a tight mess of grays and dark purples, like it had been drawn with pencil and blood. After Baines introduced her to uproarious applause, she shook her head and then brought a hand to her breast, as though needing to catch her breath.

"I am so overwhelmed by this reception," she said, "almost to the point of tears? Such incredible joy."

She brought a hand up to her eye and made a wiping gesture, as though holding back a tear. There was no tear, though. The crowd, about 200 people, redoubled its applause. The clapping lasted a good 15 seconds. A number of supporters jumped to their feet.

Wow, I thought. That looks fake.

The image of the crying mother is apparently part of the Lieberman campaign furniture. One reporter in the crowd told me that he'd seen the same act just before the election in 2000, on her birthday (Joe "surprised" her on stage with flowers), and again when Lieberman announced his candidacy this past year. Later on I went back and found this account of the 2000 birthday scene in the Washington Post:

Joseph Lieberman then led the audience in a chorus of "Happy Birthday." As they finished, the candidate suddenly emerged from stage left carrying a bouquet of flowers. Someone pushed a three-tiered cake behind him on a cart.

The audience saw the senator and began to cheer. When Marcia Lieberman looked around to see what the fuss was, she saw her son walking toward her. She put down the phone and hugged him. "Oy vey es mir," she said?Yiddish for "Oh, woe is me"?while wiping tears from her eyes.

Anyway, the crowd in Manchester was visibly moved. A few moments afterward, Mme. Lieberman introduced her son, who burst through a tight nest of SS agents from the back entrance. Lieberman, incidentally, has a reputation on the campaign trail for being the most scrupulous of all the candidates when it comes to his security. The head of one of the Manchester campaign offices for a different candidate even recounted a story about meeting with union leaders in Iowa with his candidate and Lieberman. In a closed room with no one but the union people present, Lieberman kept his SS people right behind him at all times. "It was weird, like he thought one of the local chiefs was going to shoot him," he said.

Lieberman bounded to the stage, rubbed his hands and took the mic. "Thank you, thank you," he said. "You know, having my mother introduced by the mayor of Manchester, with all of you people here? It just hits me, you know, right here."

He jabbed his heart with his thumb. Then, smiling, he nervously dabbed his forehead with a handkerchief, cleared his throat and straightened his tie. The delivery was an amazing piece of schlock, pure Poconos comedian. I imagined the campaign slogan: "VOTE LIEBERMAN. TRY THE VEAL!"

It got worse. A few minutes later, Lieberman went into one of his stock themes, his biography. Of all the candidates, Lieberman and Edwards are the most enthusiastic when it comes to highlighting their humble beginnings; both are proponents of the Mike Dukakis "I believe in the American dream; I'm a product of it" line. Lieberman's speech talks about a journey from poverty to the middle class. Apparently the story stops before the part where he becomes a wealthy senator. Smiling, he explained to the audience that he wasn't even aware that he'd been poor until later in his life.

"It reminds me of something I once read about the great Pope John XXIII," he said. "He, too, came from humble beginnings. And it wasn't until much later in his life that he realized that he'd been born with nothing?"

I was sitting next to Thomas Donovan, a local attorney who's running for the school board. "Did he just compare himself to the Pope?" I asked.

He shrugged. "Yeah, I think so," he said.

The next day, Lieberman traveled to Claremont, a small town on the Vermont border about an hour and a half away. As a rare populous location in the Western part of the state, candidates frequently visit there. And like Manchester, it has its own safe locations for candidates' visits. There are two diners in the center of town, Dusty's and the Daddypops (also called the Tumble Inn), and both are periodically besieged by invading candidates in search of photo ops. On the morning I arrived, I ate at Dusty's, which was packed, mainly because Lieberman was at the Tumble Inn. A guy next to me on the counter grumbled over his eggs. "They're there, so I'm here," he said. "Assholes." A week later, when Kerry visited Dusty's, I would find him at Daddypops.

After Lieberman left town, the owner of Daddypops, Debbie Carter, told me that another candidate had hit her place a few weeks before, but she couldn't remember whether it had been Dean or Gephardt. "It was one of them," she said. (It was actually Bob Graham). Like Lieberman, he had been "nice," although the crowd had turned away some of the regulars. "And I was really worried that one of the cameramen was going to sit on the grill," she said. "They were acting like they didn't know it was hot."

The cook, an affable black kid named James Fuskelly, told me an interesting story about Claremont: "When I was growing up here, I got arrested like six times, always for the stupidest stuff," he said. "I mean, loitering, minor in possession of alcohol, minor in possession of a non-narcotic drug?that one I was just driving and there was a kid in my car who had a bowl in his backpack. Stupid stuff. Just try it. They can arrest you in this town for standing on the street. Six times I got arrested."

"And he's a good guy," chimed in waitress Amanda Harper.

"Yeah, exactly," he said. "Then I went to Manchester for five years and never got in trouble once. But then I moved back and in less than two years and I've already been arrested twice, I'm on probation," he said. "I don't want to say anything, but I hang out mostly with black kids, and it's like the cops are following us around, looking for a reason. And meanwhile it's the white kids in town who are dealing all the crack. Seriously, come out with me sometime and stand on the street. You'll see."

"Did you meet Lieberman?" I asked.

"Yeah," he said.

"What did he say?"

"He said something like, if we don't have a strong military, then we don't have a strong defense. Something like that. And I was like, what?"