Obama Carries Momentum to N.H.
Clinton Looks To Feb. 5; McCain Aims To Top Romney

By Anne E. Kornblut and Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writers
Tuesday, January 8, 2008

LEBANON, N.H., Jan. 7 -- A buoyant Sen. Barack Obama, anticipating a victory in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, told voters Monday that he is "riding a wave, and you're the wave," as presidential candidates in both parties started to look beyond the campaign here to extended nomination fights through at least the beginning of February.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) braced for a second jarring defeat to Obama (Ill.), her voice breaking as she told a questioner in Portsmouth of her experience here, "It's not easy." Her campaign, its air of inevitability gone, is now setting its sights on the large block of Feb. 5 primary contests to salvage her hopes of winning the Democratic nomination.

Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who has seen his front-runner status in the Republican race left in tatters after a second-place finish in Iowa, is making similar calculations in the face of Sen. John McCain's revival here.

In the closing hours of the campaign, McCain (Ariz.) sought to win over independents, who under the New Hampshire rules can vote in either the Republican or the Democratic primary. That cross-party campaigning only added to the sense of urgency across the state, where political ads dominated the airwaves, campaign signs cluttered snow banks, and buses ferrying the candidates rolled down the highways.

Former senator John Edwards (N.C.), looking to build on a second-place showing among Democrats in Iowa, held a 36-hour campaign marathon, and frenzied supporters of the long-shot Republican Ron Paul stood on street corners waving signs and urging motorists to back the congressman from Texas. Former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, the GOP winner in Iowa who is simply hoping for a respectable finish here, stumped with actor Chuck Norris.

The five-day sprint from Iowa to New Hampshire created a crush of events and resulted in the complete exhaustion of several of the major candidates. Obama, his voice hoarse, reversed the order of his campaign slogan at one point; Clinton, in perhaps the notable moment of her New Hampshire effort, let her emotions show during a visit to a coffee shop in Portsmouth.

In a moment that immediately dominated the day's news, Clinton responded to what seemed to be an innocent question from a freelance photographer, Marianne Young, about how the senator manages to look good under so much pressure. After an upbeat initial response, Clinton grew serious. Her voice breaking, she replied: "It's not easy."

"It's not just public. I see what's happening, and we have to reverse it," she said, referring to the direction of the country. "Some people think elections are a game, lot's of who's up or who's down. It's about our country. It's about our kids' futures. And it's really about all of us together." The moment offered a snapshot of the severe jolt Clinton has suffered in less than a week.

Across the board, the campaigns are already looking past New Hampshire and crafting long-term strategies for protracted nominating battles. Clinton strategists, still stung by the Iowa defeat and the snowball effect it created here, are scrambling to plot a national campaign that focuses on Feb. 5. Whether to go negative against Obama -- and precisely how to do so -- was a topic of debate.

In a rally in Salem on Monday night, Clinton rebuked Obama for comparing the power of his rhetoric to that of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. and used the occasion to strike her favorite campaign theme: experience.

"President Kennedy was in the Congress for 14 years," Clinton said with a note of indignation. "He was a war hero. He was a man of great accomplishments and readiness to be president." She continued: "I'm running for president because I believe there is not a contradiction between experience and change. I don't know since when experience became some kind of liability for running for the highest office in our land."

Although Clinton had long doubted her ability to finish first in Iowa, her campaign never anticipated such a resounding defeat stretching across broad demographic lines, and her team always expected to recover quickly here. With polls showing her trailing Obama by double digits in the Granite State, Clinton is now carefully weighing her prospects in South Carolina, a state where she amassed broad support among black leaders early on but where her strategists are increasingly concerned that she has not built a sufficient grass-roots infrastructure.

With her prospects questionable in South Carolina's Jan. 26 contest and the powerful culinary union in Nevada, which will host a Jan. 19 caucus, expected to endorse Obama as early as Wednesday, the former front-runner will have to attempt a revival on Feb. 5, when 23 states including New York, New Jersey and California will vote. Her advisers said that if there is to be a housecleaning on her staff, it would be likely to come after the anticipated New Hampshire loss.

Obama appeared to gain even more momentum in his final day on the campaign trail here. At the event in Lebanon where he made the "wave" comment, an overflow crowd of 500 gathered at the entrance to the opera house as he spoke inside before a packed crowd of 750.

"We are happy warriors for change," Obama exclaimed, grinning widely as the crowd roared. "We are cheerful about the prospects of taking over."

But, like Clinton, Obama is already a candidate in transition, looking ahead to Nevada, South Carolina and what both campaigns anticipate will be a final showdown on Feb. 5.

Aides scheduled a New York City fundraiser and a stop in South Carolina for Obama later in the week and sought to block off a two-day window for the candidate to rest in Chicago.

The Obama team is increasingly optimistic about its position in South Carolina. It believes that its ground organization is far superior to Clinton's and that black voters' doubts about Obama's electability are fading as he racks up decisive victories in overwhelmingly white states.

Obama addressed the concerns of black voters in an interview with Roland S. Martin, a black radio host from Chicago, recorded Friday, the day after the Iowa caucuses. "If there's any African American voter out there who still thinks that whites won't vote for me, they just need to read the papers from this morning," Obama told Martin.

On the Republican side, McCain held seven outdoor rallies in New Hampshire where he offered brief but intense speeches as enthusiastic crowds yelled, "Mac is Back!"

"I want to be president not to ride around in a helicopter," he told a crowd in Concord. "I want to do the hard things."

McCain aides said they believe he will win, but they conceded that the outcome will be close, especially if most independents choose to vote in the Democratic primary. McCain is strong among independents, but Obama is also expected to draw strongly from that group, and that could hurt McCain in what is expected to be a one-on-one contest with Romney.

At an early-evening rally in downtown Manchester, McCain vowed to veto pork-barrel projects, fix Social Security, clean up the planet and follow Osama bin Laden "to the gates of hell." He also vowed that the United States will never give up in the fight against terrorism, but his comments sounded like they were about his campaign as well. "We will never surrender. We will never surrender," he yelled. "They will."

Like the Clinton camp, Romney aides prepared for a loss here and vowed that the former governor will soldier on regardless of his showing against McCain, whom they described as the clear front-runner in a state he won in 2000.

"He's the incumbent. He's running for reelection," quipped Tom Rath, a senior Romney strategist in New Hampshire.

If Romney loses to McCain, his advisers will argue that the GOP field remains splintered. They note that former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani has performed poorly as he waits for the campaign to arrive in Florida on Jan. 29, and they say neither Huckabee nor McCain has demonstrated broad appeal.

"We're the only guy who has competed everyplace," Rath said. "We won Wyoming. . . . We have been highly competitive in Iowa and New Hampshire. That's not a bad body of work."

That argument is contrary to months of spin from the Romney campaign, which had said victories in the early-voting states would spark momentum for the candidate that would be impossible to stop. But the campaign has little choice now that Huckabee has won Iowa and McCain is surging here.

On Wednesday, Romney and McCain will fly to Michigan, a state that both think they might win. Romney has been running television ads there for weeks, and his father was once governor. McCain won the state during his 2000 bid for office, riding a wave of enthusiasm from his victory in New Hampshire. The Michigan primary is on Jan. 15, just a week after New Hampshire votes.

Staff writers Juliet Eilperin, Perry Bacon Jr. and Shailagh Murray contributed to this report.