McBamas

Hunting the elusive McBama (also known as a "unicorn"):

The guy in the purple "I'm a health care voter" shirt stands up to ask a question at a John McCain town hall in Exeter, N.H. "I am embarrassed by our current administration," he begins, before he is interrupted by applause, "Why can't this country get Osama bin Laden? I need closure on that." He was also concerned about Iraq: "We've turned that country into hell." Though he was addressing McCain, he told me later that he had wanted to present these thoughts to both of the candidates he was considering supporting in the primary on Tuesday — McCain and Democrat Barack Obama.

The importance of independent or "undeclared" voters in the New Hampshire primary is an article of faith among both pundits and politicos. Yet the existence of voters who are actually making the choice between these two politically divergent figures has taken observers and both campaigns somewhat by surprise.

University of New Hampshire political science professor Dante Scala estimates these "McBamas" make up only 3% of the electorate. As rare as unicorns, perhaps, but just as fascinating, and potentially significant. While an Obama adviser described those split between the two as "a small sliver of the universe," the campaign is paying attention to it, as "everybody is very conscious of what happened to Bill Bradley in 2000" — when independents abandoned the moderate Democrat and helped give McCain a victory. Amy Pellerin, 38, a speech pathologist from Boscawen, N.H., was one of them. In 2004, she liked McCain so much that she wrote his name in. But this year, Obama attracts her more. "It sounds silly but I like the hopefulness and the genuine quality to his talking, she says. "I don't know, he just wants things to be different," said Pellerin, as she left Obama's rally in Nashua Friday.