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By Troy PattersonPosted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 5:40 PM ET

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Glutting on this stuff can make you feel a bit unbalanced. C-SPAN's eye never flinches. Its satellites are happy to transmit, say, five minutes of footage of Edwards not yet disembarking from his bus, or an hour of absolute crazy talk. I'm speaking, in the latter instance, of the Lesser-Known Candidates Forum. Any 35-year-old citizen with $1,000 and a healthy capacity for delusion can enter the New Hampshire primary, and, a few weeks back, a handful of such people managed to get themselves to a TV studio in Manchester. One hesitates to call the lesser-known candidates unhinged—partly because it is unkind, mostly because the term implies that they were in fact properly jointed at some point in the past, which is perhaps not strictly the case. Candidates answering to this description include Albert Howard, a Republican who decided that his future lay in politics after an angelic visitation, and Michael Skok, a Democrat whose campaign Web site states—unnecessarily, for anyone who witnessed his debate performance—that he lives with his mother. At the debate, Skok stood to the immediate left of Caroline Killeen, an 81-year-old vagabond whose platform involves the legalization of marijuana and the criminalization of your laundry room. Killeen has centered her environmental plan on outlawing drying machines, and at her appearance in Manchester, wearing snow pants at the podium, she flapped a clothesline around to drive her point home.

The night of Jan. 3 found C-SPAN airing the full proceedings of a Democratic caucus held in a high-school cafeteria in Des Moines, Iowa. (Sister channel C-SPAN2 covered a Republican caucus in Carroll County, but that was a relatively straightforward affair.) In accordance with the Democratic rules, the chairwoman directed the various factions to different areas of the room—Edwards supporters to that corner, Obama supporters to that corner, "and the Richardson folks right beside that other sign, 'Got milk?' " At first, the caucusing called to mind an elementary-school gym class (lots of hand-raising and counting-off), then, when the horse-trading began, it started to resemble the whole high-school experience, with the fundamental cliquishness and the ask-a-girl-to-the-prom anxiety. A woman from the Richardson camp approached a Dodd dude with shy eyes: "Do you want to come over to our caucus? I know I should have brought a treat. …" Eventually, the plain decency and easy seriousness of the 375 caucus-goers proved humbling. I got a little choked up. They ended up in three groups—186 for Obama, 115 for Edwards, 74 for Clinton—and the chair began the math of apportioning delegates.

And then C-SPAN stuck with the meeting as, oh, about 340 of those caucus-goers left, and those remaining proceeded with the other business on the table, debating resolutions for submission to their county platform and such. Hours later, at the moment that CNN and MSNBC and Fox News were broadcasting John Edwards' speech, C-SPAN loyalists were gorging on a heated debate about bicycle trails.