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Looking toward New Hampshire

BY CRAIG GORDON | craig.gordon@newsday.com

10:20 PM EST, January 3, 2008

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MANCHESTER, N.H. - Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani stumble into this state Friday desperate to put Iowa losses behind them but facing an enormous struggle to do so -- one that could go a long way to determining whether either of these New Yorkers has a real shot at the White House.

Both New Yorkers -- and Clinton in particular -- learned a powerful lesson of 2008 Thursday night that will go beyond New Hampshire's vote Tuesday. It came at the hands of the winners, a pair of insurgent, inspirational candidates in Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee:

Voters badly want change, and they're willing to look beyond two of the most famous -- and perhaps most famously flawed -- politicians in America to get it.

Call it the first post-post-9/11 voting. Clinton and Giuliani have run as the two people who can best save the nation from the horrors just outside its door -- Giuliani even put Osama bin Laden in a TV ad this week. Voters in Iowa seemed to cast all that worry aside to pick two relatively untested newcomers preaching a different kind of politics.

Giuliani all but abandoned the state months ago, but he risks adding an embarrassing footnote to his political resume -- he's risks losing to libertarian candidate Ron Paul for sixth-place. Few analysts expect that to be fatal, except perhaps to his pride.

But both Clinton and Giuliani have made their ultimate trump card one word -- electability. And with both sitting at 0-for-1 Friday morning, that argument appears to have evaporated. "How do you know you have a winner? Winners demonstrate they can win, and losers lose," said Andrew Smith of University of New Hampshire Survey Center.

Giuliani can't afford a second back-of-the-pack finish here, where he's running a distant third, thanks to a surging John McCain, who now must be viewed as the favorite in this state over a wounded Mitt Romney. New Hampshire Republicans "are going to wake up the next day with something akin to an allergic reaction" to Huckabee over his Christian right ties and will look to McCain, said Dante Scala of the University of New Hampshire.

But his strategy is based on winning Florida in three weeks, and his White House dreams will live or die in the Sunshine State, not in the snowy fields of Iowa.

Clinton had a different strategy -- rack up early win in hopes of putting this campaign away early, and her team positioned her almost as a president-in-waiting, the able successor to her husband. It worked for a while, but Obama proved a persistent presence, whose likability on the stump and ground-breaking appeal seemed only to highlight Clinton's negatives in the eyes of some voters.

And now with his win Thursday night, Obama seems poised for a "bounce" in this state where some 40 percent of Democrats tell pollsters they might switch candidates and a vast pool of independent voters also seems open to Obama's appeal. Clinton's lead over Obama has narrowed here dramatically -- possibly enough that spillover from his Iowa win could push him ahead of Clinton in the voting, which is just four days from Friday, little time for Clinton to recover.