Team Santorum asegura estar bien organizado en NH

National Journal:

Bill Cahill says he has visual proof that Rick Santorum's campaign has built an organization outside of Iowa capable of carrying on the momentum he gained after Iowa.

"It's here, the schedule is here," Cahill said Tuesday, holding up a thick stack of papers. Behind a cover page labeled "confidential," it contains a detailed itinerary of the former Pennsylvania senator's schedule for the next six days in the Granite State, Cahill said, evidence he'll be able to hit the ground running when he arrives for this first post-Iowa event Wednesday night.

(...) Santorum's breakneck schedule in New Hampshire won't cover unfamiliar ground, said Cahill, one of Santorum's New Hampshire co-chairs and a longtime GOP operative in the state. He said Santorum has made it a priority to barnstorm the small New England state in much the same way he did Iowa.

"I don't think people understand, and they've started to understand the last couple of weeks, just like in Iowa, where Rick Santorum has done 350 events, he's done over a 150 events here," the state chair said.

Cahill, who has worked presidential campaigns in New Hampshire dating back to George H. W. Bush's 1980 run, argues the Santorum campaign from the onset was dedicated to organizing aggressively not only in Iowa, but in New Hampshire and South Carolina. Santorum has visited each of New Hampshire's 10 counties, including its sparsely populated northern region, and has at least one chairman in each town, he said.

Santorum's state headquarters sits in a small building just outside of Manchester. On the day of the caucuses, it was quiet with no hint of the storm of activity approaching a day later. Just a handful of staffers were there at lunchtime, while a line of phones tucked away in the corner sat unmanned. It did display the clutter of a busy campaign office, however; its walls plastered with yard signs, newspaper clippings and, above all, state maps.

To be sure, Santorum's organization faces challenges. It remains small, a dwarf compared to the operation run by New Hampshire front-runner Mitt Romney. Unlike Iowa, Santorum can't claim to have campaign here harder than anyone, either: That title belongs to Jon Huntsman, who has made the state the centerpiece of his campaign and has rarely ventured outside its borders in recent months.

Santorum, whose socially conservative message likely will prove less potent in a more secular state, sits in 5th place, at 6 percent, according to a Suffolk University poll released Wednesday.

But even before he nearly won Iowa, there was a low-level buzz percolating in New Hampshire that he was poised to perform better than expectations. Cahill declined to define what, exactly, constitutes a good finish in the state, but he's not ruling another surge.

"I don't know what the expectations are; we're not going to give them very high," he said. "But if the same things happens here that happened in Iowa, in a very short, very compressed period of time, all hell could break loose."