McCain, Obama get nods in early voting after frantic days of campaigning
MANCHESTER, N.H. - John McCain jokingly predicted a landslide while hoping for a mere victory and Hillary Rodham Clinton promised a long, hard day’s work getting supporters out as New Hampshire primary voters put their stamp Tuesday on the wide-open presidential race.
Weather was spring-like and participation apparently brisk, although it remained to be seen whether New Hampshire would match the record-busting turnout of the Iowa caucuses only five days earlier. Republicans, their national race for the nomination tangled, watched a New Hampshire contest unfold between McCain and Mitt Romney at the top of the field, while Democrat Barack Obama bid for a second win against rivals Clinton and John Edwards.
“Today you can make your voice heard - you can insist that change will come,” Obama told a crowd Tuesday at Dartmouth College. “The American people have decided for the first time in a very long time to cast aside cynicism, to cast aside fear, to cast aside doubts.”
Looking back at his Iowa victory, the man who would be the first black president said: “The state was not, according to the experts, designed for me. There were not a lot of people who look like me in Iowa.”
Supporters mobbed an upbeat McCain at a Nashua polling station, making it hard for him to reach voters as they filed inside. Noting he outpolled rivals in two tiny northern hamlets that voted before the rest of the state, McCain cracked: “It has all the earmarks of a landslide, with the Dixville Notch vote.”
At Brookside Congregational Church in Manchester, 50 voters lined up before dawn and people waited in their cars for a parking space after doors opened. When Mike Huckabee passed fellow GOP candidate Rudy Giuliani outside, Huckabee jokingly asked the former New York mayor for his vote. “We get along beautifully on the trail,” Huckabee said.
Moments later Romney arrived and predicted, “The Republicans will vote for me. The independents will get behind me.”
Giuliani waved off a question about his decline in polls, pointing to the church and saying, “The only poll I’m interested in is the one that goes on inside there.” That wasn’t exactly so. At his New Hampshire headquarters, he asserted that opinion polls in some 15 states find him on top.
Critical day
The nation’s first primary offered Obama a chance to become the clear favorite for the Democratic presidential nomination while McCain and Romney competed head to head in a Republican race that could sink the aspirations of one of them.
Rooting from distant sidelines, Obama’s relatives in Kenya sat outside on plastic chairs at the end of a dusty road lined with mango and mimosa trees, listening to radio reports from New Hampshire. The Democrat’s uncle, Said Obama, commented that his nephew “has proved to be a beacon of hope here and shown that even in difficult circumstances you can make it to the highest height of achievement with just determination and hard work.”
Kogela, the western Kenyan home village of Barack Obama’s father, has been spared the violence that has erupted elsewhere following a disputed presidential election. Obama called Kenyan opposition leader Raila Odinga on Monday and was expected to do the same Tuesday with President Mwai Kibaki to express concern about the election outcome.
Former President Bill Clinton dampened expectations for his wife, saying the unusually short stretch between Iowa and New Hampshire presented little chance to counter Obama’s momentum. “It takes some time to undo that; for people to say, ‘Well, this is our race in our state and we’re going to think about this and give all these candidates a free shot,’ ” he said. “If this were 10 days after Iowa, instead of five, I believe we would have no doubt about what the outcome would be.”
Paradoxically, the struggle for primacy in the Democratic and Republican campaigns was, to an outsized degree, in the hands of independents who make up a large share of the voters here and by definition are not loyal to either party.
Clinton and her daughter Chelsea poured coffee for voters and a police officer at a Manchester elementary school before dawn. They were greeted by a dozen voters and twice as many supporters outside. “We’re going to work all day to get the vote out,” she said. Her next stop was at a polling place in a Nashua high school, where pupils who had just arrived by bus screamed with excitement and enveloped her. She worked her way to a group of 50 supporters, some hugging her as she moved down the line greeting them.
At a school in a working class Manchester neighborhood, Anna and Adam Helbling looked beyond the passions of the moment to the Democrat they think could win in the fall, and voted for Obama. “I really wanted to vote for Hillary, but I think Obama has a really good chance against a Republican rival,” Anna said.
The politics of independents
Huckabee wooed independent Joe Legay by pouring him coffee from a doughnut-shop container. “I’m independent so I have to be quiet,” Legay said when Huckabee asked how he would vote. He said later he voted for Obama.
Kathy Nadeau, 49, a property manager, backed Clinton because of her experience. “Hillary has done a good job in Washington,” she said, “and I think she can bail us out.”
The high number of independents presented an opportunity for McCain, a GOP iconoclast who won New Hampshire against establishment pick George W. Bush in 2000, and for Obama, pressing hard to build a constituency broader than his party. But it also was a complication because they were dipping into the same nonaligned pool.
Even so, polls indicated Obama had pulled ahead of Clinton as she fought to write a “comeback kid” story to rival that of her husband in 1992.
Early results
In a northern New Hampshire hamlet tradition, voters of Dixville Notch and Hart’s Location cast the first 46 ballots of the primary season - half for Democrats and half for Republicans - at midnight, hours before polls began opening elsewhere at 6 a.m. EST. Polls close at 8 p.m.
Combined results from the two spots showed Obama with 16 votes, Clinton 3, Edwards 3 and Bill Richardson, 1. On the Republican side, McCain received 10 votes, Huckabee 5, Ron Paul 4, Romney 3 and Giuliani 1.
Campaigns spared no effort to get out the vote. Clinton’ campaign was mobilizing more than 6,000 volunteers to knock on doors and nearly 300 drivers. Romney said his state headquarters, his “machine shop,” had made 100,000 phone calls.
The gym at Dartmouth was only about two-thirds full, in contrast with Obama’s packed events over the last few days. A young woman near the front of the crowd passed out while he was speaking, and he stopped his speech for a full nine minutes, staring down with his arms crossed, until she was taken out on a stretcher, alert and talking.
Comedian Larry David, who happened to be in the crowd wearing an Obama campaign button, broke the silence by remarking, “Sinatra had the same effect on people.”
Edwards, a former senator from North Carolina, hoped Clinton would be sufficiently weakened Tuesday to give him an opening and, to that end, he aimed his parting barbs at her instead of the front-runner. He again portrayed her as an agent of the status quo.
McCain held a statistically insignificant lead over Romney in late polls. Obama had a clear advantage over Clinton in surveys and Edwards trailed both, with Richardson, the New Mexico governor, in the rear.
Iowa GOP winner Huckabee campaigned vigorously in New Hampshire in the final days but without expectations of victory. He, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson and one-time national poll leader Giuliani looked to later contests. Thompson campaigned in South Carolina as New Hampshire voted.
URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/22551718/
