With Pennsylvania's primary three months away, campaign paraphernalia is hard to come by in the Keystone State. So M.G. Moody, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel from Leetsdale, capitalized on a family vacation to New Hampshire today and stopped by Santorum campaign headquarters here to pick up bumper stickers and yard signs.

Campaign volunteers here happily obliged and invited him back tonight for an Iowa caucus watch party. 

Mr. Moody said he campaigned door to door with Mr. Santorum during his 1994 U.S. Senate race. He hadn't been planning to volunteer this year, but the excitement here is contagious and now he's rethinking that. 

"If Rick does well in Iowa, it'll do a lot for him here," said Mr. Moody, 73. "The trouble with Pennsylvania is that our primary is so late we get shut out" of the winnowing process." 

The nation's eyes are on Republican presidential candidates, but they aren't the only ones running for office. President Obama's New Hampshire campaign operation wanted to remind voters of that. 

His campaign offices in Manchester, Portsmouth and Concord are operating phone banks this evening.

"We're using this event (the Iowa caucuses) as a building tool," said Pete Kavanaugh, state director of the Obama campaign. "We're using it as an opportunity to build our organization and get our volunteers back engaged in the campaign."

Most of the dozen or so volunteers in the Manchester office are students from Connecticut's Quinnipiac University who are enrolled in a class on presidential campaigns and elections. This is their third trip to New Hampshire -- this time for 10 days. They had a choice of which campaign to work for. About half picked Mr. Obama while the rest are split among the Republicans' campaigns, students said.

Jameson Cherilus, 22, of Bridgeport, Conn, said he's found voters here to be more independent-minded than those in his home state.

"Voters here are much more aware of what's going on. They take a greater responsibility because they have the first primary so their voices and opinions count a little bit more," he said.

Before launching into their phone calls, students plastered the office with small posters indicating why they support the president.

"I'm in because the top 1 percent does not pay their share," one sign reads. "I'm in because I want my grandchildren to know what polar bears are," and "I'm in because I care about my education and so does Obama," read others.

When Early Returns started doing its regular Santorum posts something like a year ago now, it was sort of an inside joke for Pittsburgh politicos trying to keep tabs on the hometown guy as he shouldered his very much uphill battle for the presidential nomination. Here and there somebody would call him a dark horse, but never did we imagine -- and again, we've been writing about him every day for months -- that he'd be considered a front-runner in Iowa.

There's a reason why it's being called the most tumultuous caucus in history.

Two weeks ago, as Jeff Zeleny writes at the NYT, he could hardly get office employees to listen to him during lunch break. Now he's getting swamped wherever he goes, as our Laura Olson has noted repeatedly the past few days.

Roger Simon at Politico surveys a scene where a scant 300 Iowans at a rally can make a candidate "dizzy with delight."

NYT poll expert Nate Silver thinks Santorum will come in third just a couple points behind Mitt Romney and Ron Paul, but says the free media from Iowa will help him much more than better paid candidates:

Still, the stronger Mr. Santorum’s performance, the more credible his claim to being the one and only “anti-Romney” candidate. Moreover, Mr. Santorum could use the earned media from a strong finish more than most of his opponents, since his campaign has little financial or organizational strength beyond Iowa. Positive momentum from the caucuses, particularly in the event of a clear first-place finish, would bide Mr. Santorum time, giving him the chance to build a more robust campaign operation before South Carolina and Florida. His near-term objective would be finishing second or a strong third in New Hampshire, which might require as little as 15 percent of the vote there.

Mark Blumenthal at Huffington Post sees the same Romney/Paul/Santorum finish.

Earned media is both good and bad for the former Pa senator. The NYT does a whole piece on his sweater vests, while CBS quotes him with the following eye-raising remarks on welfare before a mostly-white Iowa crowd:

Answering a question about foreign influence on the U.S. economy, the former Pennsylvania senator went on to discuss the American entitlement system - which he argued is being used to politically exploit its beneficiaries.

"It just keeps expanding - I was in Indianola a few months ago and I was talking to someone who works in the department of public welfare here, and she told me that the state of Iowa is going to get fined if they don't sign up more people under the Medicaid program," Santorum said. "They're just pushing harder and harder to get more and more of you dependent upon them so they can get your vote. That's what the bottom line is."

He added: "I don't want to make black people's lives better by giving them somebody else's money; I want to give them the opportunity to go out and earn the money."

UPDATE 4:56 p.m. There's some debate on what Santorum actually said. (WashPost)

Expect a lot more digging into Santorum's other comments, too, should he be catapulted into front-runner status. The liberal site Think Progress looks into his support of outlawing contraception.

Photo: NYT

As we told you this morning, the conservative Club For Growth and its president Chris Chocola are going after Rep. Tim Murphy in two new ads hitting the Upper St. Clair Republican on a pro-union vote and another on earmarks -- specifically the latter is on a transportation bill funding the Alaska "Bridge to Nowhere" project so ridiculed in 2008.

The only problem? Chocola, formerly a congressman from Indiana, voted for the bill too. (It was House roll call #453 from July 2005, which passed 412-8. See it here.)

The club's spokesman, Barney Keller, responded that Murphy's the one running for reelection, not Chocola:

"Last time I checked, Chris Chocola wasn’t running for Congress in Pennsylvania’s 18^th Congressional District," Keller said in an email. "Tim Murphy and his allies are clearly desperate to distract from his liberal record and his support for wasteful spending and the big-labor power grab known as “card-check.” The purpose of these ads is pretty simple: prompt Tim Murphy’s constituents to ask “why’d he do that?”

Photo: Chris Chocola/Club For Growth