How Obama Won a N.H. Legislator's SupportCONCORD, N.H. -- If Barack Obama was dragging at all as he headed into his final of four weekend appearances with Oprah Winfrey on Sunday night, he got an extra bounce just before he took the stage. It was in the bowels of the Verizon Center in Manchester, N.H., just moments before Obama joined Oprah and his wife before a crowd of 8,000, that Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, a first-year congresswoman from New Hampshire, told Obama that after months of indicating she would stay neutral in the state's presidential primary, she had decided to go ahead and endorse him.
"He had no idea when he came to the arena. I kept it quiet from everyone," Shea-Porter said in an interview Tuesday. "I told him I believed that he'd bring people out and bring the change we want."
The endorsement carried more of a jolt than one would normally expect from a rookie congresswoman, and caused some disquiet among Clinton campaign officials here who'd been led to believe that Shea-Porter was going to stay on the sidelines. Shea-Porter, a social worker by profession, won a following among liberal New Hampshire Democrats with her out-of-nowhere victory last year on an antiwar, grassroots platform over the far-better funded incumbent in the state's eastern congressional district, helping throw both of the state's seats into Democratic hands and providing perhaps the most unexpected of the party's many pickups across the country.
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