After N.H., Candidates Start Anew on the Road to the 'Super Bowl' of Primaries
By Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 10, 2008
MANCHESTER, N.H., Jan. 9 -- Hillary Rodham Clinton and John McCain each left New Hampshire elated over their victories in Tuesday's primaries, but neither could look ahead with confidence at a compressed calendar that will culminate in the biggest primary day in history on Feb. 5.
"It's a wide-open, pitched battle," Democratic pollster Mark Mellman said of the Democratic race between Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.). "I wouldn't give anybody a dime for their predictions."
"There is less certainty now about who the Republican front-runner is now than there was a year ago," Republican pollster Neil Newhouse said of the GOP campaign. "The race is just as wide-open as it was a year ago."
Although Obama could not repeat his Iowa victory in New Hampshire, he picked up key endorsements on Wednesday, including the Culinary Workers union in Nevada, and promised a tougher brand of politics in the week ahead.
Clinton, who stunned even her own advisers by winning on Tuesday, spent the day at her home in New York, catching a break from the intense pace of the campaign trail.
The Democratic field will lose another contender Thursday. Sources close to the campaign said New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson, a candidate with a résumé that includes service as a congressman, as secretary of energy and as ambassador to the United Nations, will announce his withdrawal in Santa Fe after a fourth-place finish on Tuesday.
Clinton and Obama began readying for the next contests on the Democratic calendar, Nevada on Jan. 19 and South Carolina on Jan. 26; they are the first states in which minority voters will play a substantial role. But Feb. 5, with contests in California, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Missouri, Georgia, Arkansas and elsewhere, looms for both campaigns as the Super Bowl event for which they are preparing.
Former senator John Edwards (N.C.), a distant third in New Hampshire after a second-place finish in Iowa, remains a factor in the Democratic race, particularly in South Carolina. He won the state in 2004.
In the Republican race, McCain, given up for dead six months ago, left here for Michigan. There he hopes to replicate his 2000 primary victory and give himself momentum heading toward South Carolina and its critical primary four days later.
But McCain faces potentially stiff competition in the next two states. In Michigan, he will be competing against former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, who finished second in Iowa and New Hampshire after leading in both until recent weeks, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, the surprise winner in Iowa.
Romney seeks to avoid elimination by winning his home state of Michigan, and pulled down ads in Florida and South Carolina to concentrate his efforts there. Huckabee hopes for a strong showing in Michigan as a springboard to South Carolina, the first test in his native South. In South Carolina, he is looking for support from religious conservatives to help give him his second victory and deal McCain a setback.
Meanwhile, former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, weakened from poor showings in Iowa and New Hampshire, has camped out in Florida in the hope that a victory there on Jan. 29 will revive his moribund campaign. Former senator Fred D. Thompson (Tenn.), who won 1 percent of the vote on Tuesday, faces a last stand in South Carolina.
Newhouse said that the top GOP candidates -- McCain, Huckabee, Romney and Giuliani -- still can paint plausible scenarios for winning the nomination, and that all four are flawed enough to keep the race as unpredictable as it has been almost from the start. "Somebody's scenario is going to come true," he said.
Clinton did a victory lap on the morning television shows Wednesday from her home in New York and continued to draw a contrast with Obama.
"I don't think of politics as a game; I think of it as a means to an end," the senator from New York said on NBC News's "Today" program. "I don't get up every morning to go out and make a great speech or shake a million hands, and then go to bed at night and say, 'Good for you.' I go out to say, 'What can I do for you? How can we make our country what it should be?' "
Obama held fundraisers in Boston and New York on Wednesday before holding a rally in New Jersey. Speaking to a boisterous, overflow crowd at Saint Peter's College in Jersey City, he said losing in New Hampshire was a sober reminder that his message of change will be met by fierce resistance.
"One of the useful things . . . about yesterday was it reminds us that change isn't easy," Obama told the crowd. "Change is hard. Change is always met by resistance from the status quo." Someone in the crowd shouted back, "Hillary is the status quo!"
Organizers said about 3,000 people -- not including hundreds of journalists -- were packed inside, and Obama said an additional 2,000 were not allowed in because of concerns that the gym was too crowded.
Showing a bit of the strain of the nearly nonstop campaigning, Obama apologized for his raspy voice. "My voice is a little hoarse. My eyes are a little bleary. My back is a little sore. But my spirit is strong," he told the crowd.
During his round of morning interviews, Obama made clear his displeasure over attacks leveled at him by the Clinton campaign over the weekend, especially charges by former president Bill Clinton about his past positions on the Iraq war.
Obama called Clinton's charges a distortion of his record and promised not to allow future attacks to go unanswered. "I come from Chicago politics," he said on MSNBC. "We're accustomed to rough-and-tumble."
Senior adviser David Axelrod said Obama told him after Tuesday's loss: " 'This wasn't meant to be easy. We were like Icarus flying too close to the sun.' "
Howard Wolfson, Clinton's communications director, called New Hampshire "the biggest possible win at the most important moment" of the campaign. "I think that it stopped Senator Obama's momentum, which had he won in New Hampshire would have even gotten greater."
A day ago, Clinton's campaign was considering whether to duck Nevada and South Carolina. On Wednesday, aides were considering plunging headlong into both states. But both campaigns are digging in for Feb. 5.
"We are no longer in a contest for states; we are in a contest for delegates," Wolfson said. "What matters now is the delegate count."
But Obama's campaign has long prepared for a protracted battle aimed at maximizing delegate accumulation even in states where Clinton is strong. David Plouffe, who is managing the Obama campaign, said it has organizations in 19 of the 22 states with Feb. 5 primaries and will gear up in the other three -- Delaware, Arkansas and Connecticut -- in a matter of days.
Neither Clinton nor Obama can claim an initial fundraising advantage coming out of New Hampshire. Each campaign raised about $25 million during the fourth quarter of last year.
Terry McAuliffe, chairman of the Clinton campaign, said it has about $25 million in cash on hand, although it was not clear how much of that can be spent only in the general election. Obama advisers said their cash flow is strong, with about $1 million a day coming this month.
McCain's campaign said its once-cash-strapped campaign is raising money at a faster clip, campaign manager Rick Davis told reporters. So far, the campaign has raised about $1 million, and aides expect the victory in New Hampshire to increase the pace of fundraising.
McCain now is unlikely to accept federal matching funds, one adviser said, a decision that would severely hamper him through spring and summer if he were to become the party's nominee.
Early Wednesday, the former Vietnam POW took his message to Michigan, where he emphasized his national security credentials and focused on economic issues in the hard-hit industrial state by pledging to help workers who have lost jobs.
"We cannot abandon them in the name of progress, in the name of the information technology revolution, in the name of anything," he said, adding that community colleges could help give these workers new skills. "We are a Judeo-Christian valued nation, and we cannot leave these great Americans behind."
Huckabee campaigned in South Carolina on Wednesday, but even as he predicted that state would be a turning point in the GOP battle, his campaign launched an ad in Michigan called "Understanding," in which he emphasized economic issues. Huckabee will appear there Friday and Saturday.
"When you grow up and life's a struggle, you have a whole different understanding of what most people are going through," Huckabee says in the ad.
Romney strategist Alex Gage sought to reassure supporters that the former governor can still win the nomination, emphasizing his change-oriented message. Exit polls in New Hampshire, he said, showed that Republicans divided their votes between McCain and Romney. In upcoming states where party rules exclude independents, he said, Romney would be a strong candidate.
Staff writers Perry Bacon Jr., Juliet Eilperin, Matthew Mosk, Shailagh Murray, Keith Richburg and John Solomon contributed to this report.
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