Iowa caucus
victories behind them, Republican Mike Huckabee and Democrat
Barack Obama vowed to stick with their winning principles
Friday in an abbreviated dash to the finish in New
Hampshire's presidential primary campaign, despite
facing a different political alignment and, as Huckabee
put it, ''only a few days to close the sale.''
Mitt Romney and
Sen. John McCain, GOP poll leaders in New Hampshire,
stood ready to try to douse Huckabee's ''prairie fire'' in a
state that lacks the religious voting bloc of Iowa and
has an ornery tradition of rejecting Iowa's Republican
caucus winners. ''It will be a different race here,''
Romney said Friday.
Obama, the
Illinois senator who dashed Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's
front-runner status in his convincing Iowa win, was rallying
in Portsmouth and Concord. Clinton was being joined in
Nashua by her husband, hoping to become the family's
newest ''Comeback Kid'' in a state that revived Bill
Clinton's run for the Democratic nomination in 1992.
Obama said he saw
no reason to revamp his campaign for new realities:
''No, it's not broken, why fix it?''
Huckabee, on the
morning talk shows, pitched his tax plan to antitax New
Hampshire Republicans and asserted his campaign is about
much more than the Christian conservatives who lifted
him in Iowa. ''What we're seeing is that this campaign
is not just about people who have religious fervor,''
he said. ''It's about people who love America but want it to
be better and believe that change is necessary and
it's not going to happen from within Washington.''
New Hampshire's
primary is Tuesday, only five days after the Iowa caucus,
in an unprecedented compression of the campaign calendar.
McCain and Huckabee anticipated more attack ads
against them.
''We're going to
be certainly always holding the option of defending my
record when people are misleading and distorting it,''
Huckabee said, in a veiled reference to Romney. ''I
think staying positive in Iowa, not doing the
political dumpster-diving that some of the other candidates
did, I believe it paid off.''
McCain called
Romney's attacks in Iowa ''a little bit desperate. It
didn't work in Iowa, I don't think it will work in New
Hampshire.'' The Arizona senator's resurgent campaign
raised him to the top of the polls against Romney in
New Hampshire, with Huckabee lagging, in pre-Iowa
surveys.
''We only have a
few days to close the sale, but I think the momentum
coming out of Iowa is going to be good for us,'' Huckabee
said. ''Then we're on to South Carolina and Florida,
where we're running first in the polls. We're going to
have a great month.'' The candidates appeared on the
network and cable morning talk shows.
Obama was neck
and neck in New Hampshire polls with Clinton, who finished
third in Iowa but has the money and organization to confront
him.
Iowa's results
tightened the Democratic field -- senators Joe Biden and
Christopher Dodd dropped out shortly after the outcome was
clear Thursday night. John Edwards mounted an
energetic, populist campaign only to see himself
repeat his 2004 second-place finish in Iowa. He vowed to
continue, but he trails Obama and Clinton in polls and in
money.
In Manchester,
Edwards portrayed the Democratic race as one between him
and Obama.
''I am the
candidate who will fight with every fiber of my being, every
single step of the way, for you, for your children, and for
your grandchildren,'' he said Friday to cheers from an
audience that included more campaign workers than
ordinary voters, and many non-New Hampshire residents.
On the Republican
side, Huckabee enters New Hampshire with little money
and little time to mount an adequate come-from-behind surge.
And tradition pulls against him. George H.W. Bush in
1980, Bob Dole in 1988 and 1996, and George W. Bush in
2000 -- all are Iowa caucus winners who lost their New
Hampshire primaries.
His Iowa victory
served to keep the GOP contest wide open. Huckabee beat
Romney by 9 percentage points, a setback for the former
Massachusetts governor who now faces a reinvigorated
McCain. Fred Thompson was looking beyond New Hampshire
to South Carolina. And Rudy Giuliani, fading in New
Hampshire, was counting on Florida and big state contests on
February 5.
In Iowa, Thompson
held on to a third-place finish over by McCain by fewer
than 300 votes, with 96% of GOP precincts reporting. McCain
spent little time or money there, investing his early
hopes in New Hampshire
An unpredictable
factor in New Hampshire could be Republican Ron Paul, an
antiwar congressman with libertarian views whose legions of
volunteers have fanned out across New Hampshire waving
placards and knocking on doors in support of their
dark horse candidate. Paul has raised a surprising
amount of money, further complicating the political
calculations in the state.
In their victory
speeches Thursday night, Obama and Huckabee struck
similar cords and distinguished themselves from their
respective fields -- portraying themselves as unifiers
and change agents who didn't view the world in simply
Republican and Democratic hues.
''You said the
time has come to move beyond the bitterness and pettiness
and anger that's consumed Washington,'' Obama told his
raucous supporters. ''To end the political strategy
that's been all about division and instead make it
about addition. To build a coalition for change that
stretches through red states and blue states. Because that's
how we'll win in November, and that's how we'll finally meet
the challenges that we face as a nation.''
Huckabee,
sounding some of the same economic populist themes that
Democrats had often heard from Edwards, said Americans were
eager for change.
''But what they
want is a change that starts with a challenge to those of
us who were given this sacred trust of office so that we
recognize that what our challenge is to bring this
country back together, to make Americans, once again,
more proud to be Americans than just to be Democrats
or Republicans,'' he said. ''To be more concerned about
being going up instead of just going to the left or to
the right.''
Money, a defining
measure of candidate strength throughout 2007, turned
out to be not so determinative in Iowa. Romney, a
multimillionaire who pumped more than $17 million of
his own money into the campaign by September, spent
about $7 million on ads in Iowa to Huckabee's $1.4
million.
Likewise, Edwards
remained in the mix with Obama and Clinton even though
they broke all fund-raising records last year. Obama spent
$9 million on television ads in Iowa, Clinton spent $7
million and Edwards spent only $3 million.
Romney's and
Clinton's inability to win was also a blow to much of the
Democratic and Republican party establishment that had lined
up behind both candidates.
But if money was
only secondary in Iowa, it could still be a factor
ahead. Romney could tap his wealth again to carry him
through New Hampshire and Michigan thereafter. And
with Obama and Clinton at the top, the Democratic
contest appears to be dominated by two financial titans.
As Clinton
campaign manager Patti Solis Doyle said after the results
were in: ''Our campaign was built for a marathon and
we have the resources to run a national race in the
weeks ahead.''
Polls of Iowa
voters as they entered the caucuses found that Obama
outpolled Clinton among women, and benefited from a surge in
first-time caucus-goers and young voters in what was a
record Democratic turnout. Similar enthusiasm in New
Hampshire could again favor Obama.
Huckabee rode to
victory on the strength of born-again or evangelical
Christians, who made up six in 10 Republican
caucusgoers. But New Hampshire's Republican electorate
is less overtly religious and more fiscally
conservative. Even so, Huckabee has a penchant for retail
politics and offers a message that is not singularly
religious in tone. (Jim Kuhnhenn, AP)
