Candidates make last push for N.H. votes

Mitt Romney was reluctant to predict victory, but not so John McCain.

MANCHESTER, N.H. (AP) — Her voice quavering, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton struggled Monday to avoid a highly damaging second straight defeat in the Democratic presidential race. Republicans John McCain and Mitt Romney scrapped for success on the eve of a New Hampshire primary that neither could afford to lose.

“You’re the wave, and I’m riding it,” Sen. Barack Obama, the new Democratic front-runner, told several hundred voters who cheered him in 40-degree weather after being turned away from an indoor rally filled to capacity.

Obama has been drawing large, boisterous crowds since he won the Iowa caucuses last week, and a spate of pre-primary polls showed him powering to a lead in New Hampshire, as well.

Clinton runs second in the surveys, with former Sen. John Edwards of North Carolina third, and the former first lady and her aides seemed to be bracing for another setback.

At one stop, she appeared to struggle with her emotions when asked how she copes with the grind of the campaign — but her words still had bite. “Some of us are ready and some of us are not,” she said in remarks aimed at Obama, less than four years removed from the Illinois Legislature.

New Hampshire fairly crawled with candidates, so much so that at one point, McCain’s three-bus caravan drove past Rep. Duncan Hunter of California, a long-shot Republican standing on a street corner with two other people waving to cars.

Opinion polls made the Republican race a close one between McCain, the Arizona senator seeking to rebound from last summer’s near collapse of his campaign, and Romney, the former governor from next-door Massachusetts.

After sparring over taxes and immigration in weekend debates with McCain and former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, Romney cast himself as the Republican best able to hold the White House. “I think Barack Obama would be able to do to John McCain exactly what he was able to do to the other senators who were running on the other side,” Romney said as he sped his way through a half-dozen events on a final full day of campaigning.

Mindful of the polls, though, he declined to predict victory in a state where he had led in surveys for months.

McCain wasn’t nearly as reluctant. “We’re not gonna lose here,” he boasted as he set out on a packed day of campaigning through seven cities. In a snow-draped setting in Keene, there seemed little doubt he had Romney in mind when he said voters would reject negative campaigning. “I don’t care how many attack ads you buy on television,” he said.

Romney has run several TV commercials against McCain in New Hampshire, arguing that the senator’s immigration plan would offer amnesty for illegal immigrants and painting him as a disloyal Republican for twice opposing President Bush’s tax cuts. McCain responded with an ad that includes a quote from The Concord Monitor that suggested Romney was a phony.

Obama won his Iowa victory on a promise of bringing change to Washington, trumping Clinton’s stress on experience. She has struggled to find her footing in the days since, at the same time insisting she is in the race to stay.