The national press fixated on one thing during Hillary Clinton's visit last weekend to New Hampshire: her position on Iraq. Story after story described voters challenging Clinton on her 2002 vote to authorize President Bush to go to war, and questioning why Clinton refused to renounce her vote, a la John Edwards.

But in at least one instance during Clinton's Granite State swing, several national reporters seemed to omit part of a voter's question in order to buttress their tough-questions-on-Iraq angle. At a Nashua house party, a woman told Clinton that her position on Iraq "doesn't fly," a quote that made it into articles by the Associated Press, New York Times and Boston Globe.

Those articles left out that the questioner (named by the AP as Claire Helfman) proceeded to say that she could support Clinton if the New York senator could say that if she knew then what she knows now, she wouldn't have voted for the war. "If you can say that, then I can support you," Helfman said.

Clinton has in fact made that statement on numerous occasions, and she proceeded to recount it at the house party (to applause from the 60-strong audience). "I've said it on public television, I've said it in speeches," Clinton said. "If I had known then what I know now, I would never have voted to give this president that authority."

When another woman asked Clinton why she had not renounced her vote, Clinton stuck to the explanation that she gave throughout her weekend campaign stops: "The mistakes were the president's," Clinton said.

Punch lines

Clinton snuck a couple of jokes into each of her campaign appearances (sometimes, the same joke popped up at multiple stops).

In Concord on Saturday, a malfunctioning microphone prompted the first joke of the event. ("Can you all turn me on?" Clinton asked.) Then there was the Dunkin' Donuts joke, where Clinton pledged to omit excessive donut stops from her New Hampshire campaign.

And Clinton showed that she's willing to poke fun at herself. Describing her plan to keep old New Hampshire friends while also wooing new supporters, Clinton referenced a YouTube video that has her singing (in unimpressive fashion) the national anthem: "I'm not going to sing it, because if you go to YouTube, you'll see why. There was a song we used to sing in Girl Scout meetings: 'Make new friends but keep the old.' "

On Sunday, the laughs continued with jokes about Osama bin Laden ("it's a mystery to me how we still haven't found the tallest man in Afghanistan") and her failed 1993 attempt at crafting a universal health care system.

Big, bigger, biggest

It's only February, but the primary campaigns are already engaging in superlative swapping and other forms of one-upmanship in their press releases. Saturday afternoon, Clinton's organization sent a press release carrying the headline "Clinton's New Hampshire Kick-off Draws Record Crowd in Berlin." A follow-up a few minutes later declared "Clinton's Concord Conversation Draws Over 3,000 People," with a subheading about the earlier "Record Crowd" in Berlin.

Less than an hour afterward, an e-mail came through from Barack Obama's camp with a crowd estimate of 15,000 to 17,000 for the senator's announcement speech in Illinois. The press release also noted the weather braved that day by the crowd in Springfield: 16 degrees, with a wind-chill of 5.

Northern exposure

About that "record crowd" in Berlin of 300 at City Hall plus 200 in an overflow room across the street - the Clinton release qualified it a bit, explaining that "it's the first time in recent memory that a presidential candidate has kicked off a campaign in the North Country and has drawn a crowd this size."

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