by RICHARD BENEDETTO
Observer staff

MANCHESTER, N.H. - The transition from working journalist to college professor was never more jarring than this week when I came here not as a newspaper reporter, as I had for every New Hampshire primary since 1984, but as an adviser to 28 American University student journalists.

Rather than make snap decisions on which candidates or campaign events I wanted to cover, jump in a rented car and slush my way around the Granite State’s heavily salted highways, I had to leave decisions where we would go to the students, and then chauffer them around.

So for the past three days, starting each time from our Best Western Hotel headquarters in Manchester, we zigzagged our silver KIA minivan around the state like a shiny sphere in a pinball machine. We bounced to Concord to Salem, Peterborough to Milford, Bedford to Hooksett, and points between.

As we went, day and night, students interviewed potential voters in bars watching the candidates debate, put questions to campaign staffers in crowded and chaotic storefront offices, waited for more than an hour outside a high school gym in 30-degree temperatures to get into a Barack Obama rally, and then another hour inside waiting for the perennially tardy candidate to show up.

Then it was on to a Hillary Clinton rally.

“Wow, this is a lot more hectic than I though it would be,” was a common student refrain as we endured the rigors of 14-hour days.

But hectic or not, everyone seemed to be having fun, which is what I always thought political reporting should be.

We attended a New Hampshire Republican State Committee fundraising brunch where it was clear from the mood of the crowd of GOP movers and shakers that there is an enthusiasm deficit in the party here. They still haven’t found a candidate they think can win in November.

One group of students is profiling Steve DeMaura, a 2007 AU graduate who is now executive director of the New Hampshire GOP. Steve, a young man of high energy and good cheer, has the enviable task of injecting some life into a seemingly demoralized party.

Interviewing Hillary Clinton supporters, it was easy to detect frustration in their tense body language and their rising voices as they watched their once-inevitable candidate’s lead in the polls slip away. They say they can’t understand how she could be losing when they see her as “so much smarter” than her opponents. “Brilliant,” is the way one young woman described her.

On the other hand, Obama backers were almost giddy as they anticipated another win for the charismatic Illinois senator, even though there isn’t much meat in his soaring oratory.

Some Obama women who once supported Clinton say they switched because they see Hillary as “too angry” and “too shrill.”

For me, the salt-crusted minivan has become a rolling classroom as I lecture my captive audience of students on the history of the New Hampshire primary, the various strategies of the candidates, the meaning of the polls, the mindset of the media and where we can get something to eat.

And I caution them that as budding political journalists they have to put their personal preferences and biases aside and become neutral observers as they cover the candidates and their campaigns. That is not easy to do, but in my mind, it is essential to good reporting.

I could hear the students’ eyes rolling behind me.

“Can we turn on the radio,” I heard one voice calls from the back jokingly.

Richard Benedetto is longtime political reporter at USA TODAY and an adjunct professor in the School of Communication at American University.