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"FacebookPinterest\n\nJon Huntsman wore a tight smile. The lines in his face seemed deeper, too, than in the heady days when he smiled out from splashy magazine spreads and breathless cable news spotlights. The Tidland Corporation plant in Keene was his third stop of the bitterly cold day--with an evening event yet to come. Standing in front of a dozen factory workers, he glanced briefly at the floor, looked up, gathered himself, and said: \"I'm asking for your vote.\" He said it like he was asking a favor.\n\nTo be sure, Huntsman tried his best to exude confidence. He gamely toured the factory floor in clear plastic safety glasses, gripping and grinning with workers on shift, and he spent a half hour answering questions for employees seated in a little half moon of chairs. But his pitch was clipped and emotionless, even a little sad: \"All I want you to remember is that Huntsman guy, he's the underdog,\" he said in a tone of exhaustion. \"New Hampshire loves underdogs. We need your help and support.\"\n\nHe seemed every bit the man on the verge of defeat. Which, despite the enormous amount of time he's invested here, he appears to be.\n\nHuntsman has been campaigning exclusively in New Hampshire for months, having determined that his reputation as a reasonable moderate and an Obama appointee would doom him among Iowa's notoriously conservative caucus-goers. So he has been here day after day after day, sucking up to voters in coffee shops and schools and town halls across the state. It hasn't worked. With Iowans caucusing last night and the full-on primary circus arriving here today, Huntsman is stuck at 10 percent or lower in most polls.\n\nThe camp-out-in-New-Hampshire strategy has been employed in the past with mid success. It worked, most notably, for John McCain, who had too little money and too little appeal among evangelicals to make a go of it in Iowa. McCain dedicated himself to holding town hall meetings across New Hampshire, and the Granite State rewarded him for it with a big win that completely reset the Republican primary. (Mike Huckabee, you may or may not recall, won the Iowa caucuses and disappeared shortly thereafter.) But McCain--who clunkily endorsed his old foe Romney at an event in Manchester today--had something going for him that Huntsman can't match: universal name recognition from having run here (and won here) in 2000, and a fiery personality that helped him break through the clutter and withstand the wave of Iowa-born momentum.\n\nThe reactions among the workers at the plant that Huntsman visited today offered a vivid picture of his problems. Few of the employees working the afternoon shift seemed to have heard of Huntsman, and none I talked to were ready to commit to him. By and large, they said they're just now starting to pay attention to the race--and Huntsman's months-long tour of the state may as well have happened in a vacuum.\n\n\"It'll take some more research, some more reading,\" said James Merrill, a 62-year-old machinist from nearby Winchester, of his decision-making process. His shift-mate, Frank Klitch, said he too was undecided, and that the barrage of ads and phone calls from the campaigns was starting to wear on him. \"It gets aggravating,\" he said, resting his substantial hands on a newly machined metal cylinder he described as a GL bearing shaft. He'd just shaken Huntsman's hand and said he was pleased to have met him. \"But it was kind of fast,\" he said.\n\nFrom Keene, Huntsman headed to a lavishly produced town hall event in Peterborough where, with his competitors sweating out a tense evening in Des Moines, he was set to have New Hampshire to himself for one last time. Even the location seemed freighted with messaging: Peterborough is the same town where McCain held the final event of his 2008 crusade. The question for Huntsman, as ever, was whether anyone would really be listening.\n\nBack in October, Huntsman held a similar event in Hopkinton, playing up his fealty to New Hampshire on a night when every other candidate was in Nevada for a debate. \"What happens in Las Vegas stays in Vegas--but what happens in New Hampshire impacts the world!\" It didn't quite get off the ground. He never managed to get the room fired up, and his abject flattery came across as awkward. He seemed to be re-learning the old high school lesson that no one likes to be liked that much. When the all-important local news came on at 11pm, it led with the Vegas debate anyway.\n\nAs he was heading out of that October event, I asked Huntsman how high he needed to place here in order to keep his candidacy going. \"High, high,\" he said, insisting that New Hampshire is the kind of place that rewards dogged face-to-face campaigning above all else. \"There are 1.5 million people in New Hampshire and the buzz factor works very well. Which we're getting now.\"\n\nOr not. With every news outlet in the country going berserk over the Romney-Santorum photo finish, Huntsman appears to have been proven wrong--resembling not so much John McCain as two others who bet the house on New Hampshire and got wiped out for lack of appeal: Joe Lieberman and Wesley Clark. Data from New Hampshire polling guru Andy Smith, released on Christmas Day, showed Huntsman in fourth place with a meager 11 percent--28 points behind front-runner Romney.\n\nWhen Huntsman offered up the mike for questions yesterday afternoon, he got a rather telling response from one of the plant's floor managers: \"One of the things people asked of me as you walked around,\" the manager said, \"was 'who is this guy?'\""^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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