ROCHESTER, N.H. -- So I asked the reigning champ the obvious question, what the secret is. And she smiled and made the obvious seem revelatory: ''The secret is that there is no secret. My conventional wisdom is that there is no conventional wisdom.''
Unless the secret is that hard grunt work in the precincts can still matter in politics.
In New Hampshire primaries, Jeanne Shaheen has caused more earthquakes than Mother Nature: Jimmy Carter, when he was a no-account former governor of Georgia 23 years ago; Carter again when he was a decided underdog to Edward Kennedy in 1980; and then, the legendary one - Gary Hart from out of the blue in 1984 over former Vice President Walter Mondale.
To that you should add her own improbable elevation from state senator to governor in 1996, followed by a landslide in '98 that brought in the first Democratic state Senate in 86 years on her coattails.
The fact that she is now officially with Al Gore for the primary less than two months away is anything but news. Her husband Billy has been chairing the Gore operation for months. The governor, in fact, would have been on board two months ago, had not a long-running school-funding crisis flared anew.
When she made it official over the weekend in this important population center of eastern New Hampshire, it was no accident that the first thing she and Gore did before another public meeting in Portsmouth near her old Senate district was to go canvassing door to door for a couple of hours.
Shaheen is an unabashed fan of the revamped Gore campaign. She loves the long town meetings where Gore stays until the last voter with a question has had the chance to ask it. And she believes that regular canvassing by the candidate himself is time productively spent.
It was ironic that while the Gore-Shaheen alliance was being formally unveiled inside the Chamberlain Street School here, a small knot of Bill Bradley supporters outside was passing out a statement by the state director, Mark Longabaugh, vowing to press on and defeat ''the political establishment.''
Going down the stretch here, with the primary up for grabs, being called the establishment is certainly a twist and a first. Shaheen has never done politics from that position, and certainly doesn't govern that way. It was ironic also that to slightly counter the governor's announcement, Longabaugh released some more converts to Bradley's ''steering committee,'' a list of supporters that now includes 2,500-plus people.
Every campaign uses this organizing tool now. In New Hampshire, the patent for it should belong to Shaheen.
''My favorite was 20 years ago, getting ready for the second Carter campaign when he was a big underdog to Senator Kennedy,'' she told me. ''We had the idea of having a large committee of supporters to show we were very much alive.'' Back then, the last Democratic governor, the late Hugh Gallen, was still in office, and the notion was to send a personal letter from him to 5,000 Democratic officials and activists, asking for support.
''In 1979, remember, there were no signature machines,'' she went on. ''Each letter was done individually, with some kind of personal message, and then signed by Gallen. We ended up with more than 700 people on our committee.''
The truth is, there are other hallmarks to a Shaheen operation in New Hampshire and they, too, have become part of the landscape. Wise Democrats pay special attention, for example, to the parts of the state that tend to get ignored in general elections because they are mostly Republican, such as Carroll County in the Northeast and all along the western part of the state. In her own case, Shaheen has also been strong among politically independent and moderate voters who are usually the margin of victory. What is less well known is that her political success comes attached to a deeply held philosophy that mirrors Gore's.
Shaheen came out of the Ozarks on the Missouri side, the daughter of Republican parents, and got her master's degree from the University of Mississippi. Since arriving here, her activism on behalf of presidential candidates has been consistent, as she summarized it: ''They have tended to be the moderate Democrats, the New Democrats, they haven't been the more traditional liberals.''
Same goes for her governance. She is a well-known education reformer, an earlier leader in the electric utility deregulation movement to slash rates, a managed-care reformer before the patients' rights movement was nationally prominent, and a civil rights and women's rights tiger.
Her alliance with Gore has personal as well as policy roots, not the least being that the Shaheens and Gores became grandparents last year.
Anything can happen and no doubt will, but if Gore makes it, Jeanne Shaheen would be no token short-list name on his vice presidential list. With her, gender would be the gravy, not the pot roast.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
