MANCHESTER, N.H.

I LIKE to get to New Hampshire every four years. If the Frank Capra movie It’s a Wonderful Life had been about a political campaign it would be the New Hampshire primary, and downtown Manchester would be its stage. Here future presidents have mixed with television anchors, supporters of causes (odder and odder as the quadrennia go by), ordinary folk, and people come down from the mountains to watch them all. For the last several “cycles” (as the news anchors say) there has been nothing like it in American presidential politics.

We forget that when It’s a Wonderful Life, with its would-be angel and simple sense of good and evil, was released, in 1946, reviewers derided it. But the saps liked it and it has become a Christmas classic. In politics, I yearn to be a sap. I love the idea that candidates for president with the political equivalent of what Bob Dylan called “her fog, her amphetamine and her pearls” must come face to face with the wonderful lives of those they aspire to represent.

This year, as in the past, I decamped on a sidewalk on Elm Street, in Manchester, in front of the well-known Merrimack Restaurant, and waited for a story. I had some trepidation that I would find the New Hampshire oracle transformed into “aura kill” by the consultants, pollsters and media manipulators who are the tuneless equivalent of amphetamine and pearls.

A few things have changed since 2004. Most of the candidates didn’t have storefront headquarters, as they had in the past, and the storefronts there were seemed to be Potemkin villages rather than active political command centers. Howard Dean’s 2004 headquarters is now a Rent-a-Center. The closest I got to Barack Obama was to pass his motorcade speeding in the other direction on Route 93. The major candidates’ supporters eschewed street politics, which were left to the minor candidates Ron Paul and Dennis Kucinich and to the theater of the absurd — for example, happy clowns in Uncle Sam suits riding up and down Elm Street in a sound truck asking for votes for our next president . . . “Vermin!”

Senators Clinton and Obama were the only candidates with Secret Service protection. (Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney had privately paid police impersonators who were one of his many embarrassments.) But the major media had it both ways: They set up in the street just like “Vermin,” but they were cordoned off from the unwashed by miles and miles of yellow police tape. The worst offender was ABC News, which commandeered the plaza in front of City Hall.

I also cry for brass spittoons, the Boston Braves and the subjunctive mood: My quibbles about New Hampshire do not belie that it still sees the candidates up close and still renders its conclusions therefrom. After several hours of sauntering, loitering and chatting people up without moving more than 300 yards from the Merrimack Restaurant, I sensed slippage by Mr. Obama’s apogean star; firmly staid support for Mrs. Clinton; a surge for Mr. Edwards, and — how shall I put it? — a Goodrich blimp touting Mr. Romney from on high.

On my way out of town I stopped in North Rockingham to call a friend up in the hills with my predictions: On the Republican side, Mr. McCain, and on the Democratic side, the top three Democrats in any order. I had it right that the problem wasn’t that the “Goodrich” blimp Mr. Romney was riding wouldn’t fly in the market, it was that there’s no such thing. (It’s Goodyear!) Along with many other rats in the pack, I missed that if Mr. Edwards really did surge, New Hampshire doesn’t generally like to waste firewood or votes when it’s cold. Defying predictions, the uncast Edwards votes went to Mrs. Clinton, not to Mr. Obama.

Afterwards, inside one of the cordoned-off media tents, someone was asking: “Does anyone know Dr. Kervorkian’s number?” Or so I imagined. In 2008, New Hampshire looked, listened and spat answers that were both subtle and decisive, both less than final and probably dispositive. That I didn’t imagine.

The American presidential election has become, if anything, more medieval, since Sen. George McGovern tried to reform the nominating process after the tragic election of 1968. Our methods today are more accumulated custom after the fashion of the unwritten British Constitution than they are a product of the declarative sentences of the American constitution. The winner of the Iowa caucuses or the New Hampshire primary can be seen as something akin to the Warden of the Cinque Ports (an honorary position Churchill held at the end of his life). A lot of people find our early selection process to be absurd and appalling.

The most common complaint is that racially and culturally Iowa and New Hampshire don’t reflect modern America. But before we turn the next presidential election over to a committee of academic systems analysts, I would note that Iowa and New Hampshire do reflect what remains a numerical majority, as well as a cultural center of values that includes all races. Had Mr. Obama carried a District of Columbia primary it would have meant nothing. But by successfully appealing to Iowa’s voters he transformed his chances of becoming president.

On the other hand, much is made of the notion that because Mr. Obama wears a belt and ties his shoelaces he isn’t stereotypically “black” enough. That shows as much ignorance of what it means to be black in America as many critics have up to now had of what it means to be from Iowa or New Hampshire.

There may be better ways of electing a president. But requiring presidential candidates to look voters square in the eye, again and again, before submitting themselves to a statewide primary in a state that looks, listens and spits, proved its worth again in 2008. To paraphrase Churchill, it may be the worst way to choose a president, except the rest.

David A. Mittell Jr. is a member of The Journal’s editorial board.