NASHUA, N.H. — With their presidential hopes and political legacy on the line, Hillary Rodham Clinton and her husband battled across New Hampshire on Sunday, fighting to become the comeback couple of the 2008 race.
Change was the word on their lips as they campaigned across this slushy state -- separately, to cover more ground -- taking thinly veiled shots at rival Barack Obama.
"You campaign in poetry. You govern in prose," Hillary Clinton told a raucous rally at a high school gym in Nashua, where the overflow crowd matched the Illinois senator's audience a day earlier.
Later, talking to reporters, she acknowledged some retooling in her campaign and drew a proverbial line in the snow. "If the campaign doesn't evolve, it probably is dead," she said. "And I don't intend for it to be anything other than a winning campaign."
In North Conway, in the picturesque White Mountains, former President Clinton challenged Obama's oft-stated boast that he, alone among the major Democratic contenders, had opposed the Iraq war from the start. Bill Clinton cited a July 2004 interview in which Obama offered a somewhat more qualified statement of opposition.
"The point is, it's inconsistent," Clinton said.
Yet though they spoke of the future, the Clintons every step was shadowed by the past.
New Hampshire, after all, is the state where Bill Clinton nearly buckled in 1992 under allegations of womanizing and draft-dodging, persevering to finish second in a Lazarus-like performance (abetted by some artful spin) that set him on the road to the White House.
With that precedent, some called it premature to fashion the New York senator's political tombstone, even after her dismal third-place finish Thursday in Iowa.
David Moore, a veteran New Hampshire pollster, noted that phenoms like Obama had stumbled in the past when their messages wore thin. There was Howard Dean and before him Gary Hart, a New Hampshire winner who fell apart after Walter F. Mondale challenged his promise of "new ideas" with the famous put-down, "Where's the beef?"
Clinton is undeniably on the defensive. A new batch of polls showed Obama steadily climbing in New Hampshire, after his unexpectedly strong victory in Iowa.
And in an ominous sign for Clinton, a recent University of New Hampshire survey found 6 in 10 Democratic voters said it was more important to them to find a candidate who could bring about change than to elect one with experience. In Iowa, the change argument also won out over experience, greatly benefiting Obama, according to a survey of voters entering their polling places.
