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Primary Battles Promise To Continue

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By ANNE E. KORNBLUT and MICHAEL D. SHEAR, The Washington Post

Published: January 8, 2008

LEBANON, N.H. - A buoyant Sen. Barack Obama, anticipating a victory in today's New Hampshire primary, told voters Monday that he is "riding a wave, and you're the wave," as presidential candidates started to look toward extended nomination fights through next month.

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton braced for a second jarring defeat to Obama, 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 Gov. 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 sought to win over independents, who under New Hampshire rules can vote in either the Republican or Democratic primary.

Former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina, looking to build on a second-place showing among Democrats in Iowa, held a 36-hour campaign marathon.

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, the Republican winner in Iowa who is 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 exhaustion of several 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 when a freelance photographer asked her how she has held up so well on the campaign trail.

Her voice breaking, Clinton replied: "It's not easy. It's not easy.

"And I couldn't do it if I just didn't, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do," she said, her voice catching.

"You know, I've had so many opportunities from this country, I just don't want to see us fall backwards," she said, her voice trailing off.

Clinton Again Touts Her Experience

Across the board, the campaigns already are looking past New Hampshire and crafting long-term strategies for protracted nominating battles.

Clinton strategists, 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 how to do so - was a topic of debate among her aides.

In a late rally in Salem on Monday night, Clinton sternly rebuked Obama for comparing the power of his rhetoric to that of former President John F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King, and used it 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."

McCain: 'We Will Never Surrender'

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 also is expected to draw strongly from them, which could hurt McCain in an expected one-on-one contest with Romney.

At a 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 braced for a loss here and vowed that the former governor will soldier on regardless of his showing against McCain, whom they described as the front-runner in a state he won in 2000.

"He's the incumbent. He's running for re-election," quipped Tom Rath, a senior Romney strategist.

If Romney loses to McCain, his advisers will argue that the field of Republican candidates remains splintered. They note that former New York Mayor Rudy 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.

Information from The Associated Press was used in this report.

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