STAY IN SCHOOL Hillary (Photo: Getty Images)
Still smarting from her third-place finish in Iowa, Hillary Clinton heads into New Hampshire having learned a valuable lesson: don't try to strong-arm a college kid.

Slate's Trailhead blog notes that a misstep in one undergrad-heavy district just may have cost Clinton the delegates she needed to procure that second-place tie with John Edwards. Writes Christopher Beam: "In the Grinnell Ward 1 caucus I attended, Hillary had 44 supporters. She needed 73 to be reach the 15 percent viability threshold. Had she been viable, she would have received at least six of the precinct's 37 delegates. In other words, had 30 more Grinnell residents turned out for Hillary and 30 less for Edwards, she would have tied John Edwards for second in the state."

Grinnell is, of course, home to Grinnell College, an academic institution Clinton never bothered to visit (she was the only major Democratic candidate not to do so). Her decision to skip the campus wasn't exactly arbitrary: Clinton was busted last November for using a Grinnell student as an audience "plant" during an energy speech in Newton, Iowa.

The student, a sophomore, had wanted to ask Hillary how her energy plan compared to the other candidates. She was instead instructed by a Clinton staffer to ask, "As a young person, I'm worried about the long-term effects of global warming. How does your plan combat climate change?" She obliged so as to "be agreeable," but word of the incident got out after it was reported in a school paper. Needless to say, it certainly buttressed the New York senator's reputation as someone who is so calculating as to seem inauthentic. Which some might say is why she finished third in the first place.

As Beam notes, it's not hard to imagine that Clinton could have swung at least 30 impressionable young voters with a single visit. For the record, her staff claimed that the Grinnell incident was an isolated one and that no further plants would be used in the future, despite the fact that a handful of "I was told to ask this!" stories surfaced in its aftermath.