MANCHESTER, N.H. - With campaign crowds swelling and time running out before Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, presidential contenders sought yesterday to score with the state's elusive undecided voters - and none more so than Mitt Romney, who cast himself as an agent of change and portrayed his chief rival, John McCain, as an ossified creature of Washington.
Romney, who needs a strong showing in New Hampshire after a distant second-place finish in Thursday's Iowa caucuses, sharpened his campaign message, making several references to what he called the "old faces" in Washington, whom he compared to "a broken-down automobile clunker that you have to push in the station and say, 'Can you fix this for me?' "
Romney and other candidates used appearances across New Hampshire to address their main vulnerabilities and stoke concern about their opponents following victories by Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee in Iowa's caucuses.
The contenders from both parties engaged directly - and at times forcefully - at the day's marquee event: back-to-back prime-time debates at Saint Anselm College in Manchester last night. Romney came under sustained attack in the GOP debate as Huckabee and McCain highlight ed, sometimes acidly, his shifts on major issues.
When Romney and Huckabee sparred over foreign policy, Romney said, "Governor, don't try to characterize my position."
"Which one?" Huckabee shot back, inducing a steely stare from Romney.
Later, after Romney said he represented change, McCain, delivering the line with a wide grin, said, "We disagree on a lot of issues, but I agree you are the candidate of change."
"The continued personal remarks are interesting but unnecessary," Romney responded icily.
The Democratic candidates spent the bulk of their debate arguing over the central question of their race: what change means, and who represents it. While Obama said his Iowa victory was evidence people are "hungry for change," Senator Hillary Clinton suggested her opponents were "raising the false hopes" of Americans by promising change they were unprepared to deliver.
"I embody change," she said.
Former senator John Edwards of North Carolina, who finished slightly ahead of Clinton in Iowa, aligned himself with Obama as a like-minded opponent of the status quo, gesturing pointedly to Clinton. That prompted her to reply angrily that she had spent her career working for change, not just talking about it.
But the politicking was fierce even before the TV cameras were turned on. At campaign stops yesterday, Romney tried to beat back McCain, the 71-year-old, 25-year veteran of Congress who is competing with the former Massachusetts governor for the GOP lead in New Hampshire. Romney at times sounded more like Obama, who has built his campaign around a promise of transformational change. Romney said he alone could harness voters' desire for change and beat Obama in a general election.
"The American people recognize we're not going to change Washington by sending back the same old faces and just have them change chairs," Romney, noticeably more energetic on stage, told about 250 people at Pinkerton Academy in Derry.
McCain's campaign responded by distributing remarks from Romney in 2002, in which he said the Arizona senator "has always stood for reform and change. And he's always fought the good battle, no matter what the odds."
During an hourlong appearance at Peterborough's Town Hall, which the fire marshal closed to additional participants after 650 people showed up, McCain responded angrily to charges aired in Romney's campaign ads that McCain favored amnesty and Social Security benefits for illegal immigrants. "That is absolutely false," he said.
Several tracking polls released yesterday indicated McCain slightly ahead of Romney. He led 33 percent to 27 percent in a CNN/WMUR poll, 31 percent to 26 percent in a Rasmussen Reports poll, and 32 percent to 30 percent in a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby survey. Huckabee was fourth in the CNN and Rasmussen surveys with 11 percent, behind Rudy Giuliani in CNN's and Ron Paul in Rasmussen's, and third in Zogby's with 12 percent.
Huckabee, like Romney, has retooled his message for New Hampshire, shedding some of his overt appeals to the social conservatives and evangelicals that powered his Iowa win and talking instead about freedom and liberty.
"Your state motto, 'Live Free or Die,' really exemplifies the very heart of America," the former Arkansas governor said yesterday at a Londonderry school.
In the Democratic race, Obama and Clinton both drew large crowds yesterday as polls gave a conflicting snapshot of the race. The CNN/WMUR survey had them tied at 33 percent, with Edwards at 20 percent.
The Zogby survey suggested Clinton hanging on to her lead over Obama, 32 percent to 28 percent, with Edwards at 20 percent. But the Rasmussen poll indicated Obama with momentum out of Iowa, leapfrogging Clinton to grab a 10 percentage-point lead, 37 percent to 27 percent, with Edwards at 19 percent.
Obama and Clinton took markedly different approaches on the trail yesterday. While Obama played it safe by delivering more or less his standard speech, urging supporters to stay the course, and taking no questions, Clinton departed from her typical practice and entertained audience queries for almost two hours at a rally in Penacook. The move seemed designed to address past criticism that she is inaccessible to voters.
Clinton issued fresh warnings about Obama, implicitly linking his pitch with that of George W. Bush before the 2000 election. It would be dangerous, she suggested, if voters again fell for a candidate who relies more on intuition and a unifying message than experience.
"He was going to bring people together and end partisanship, he was going to have people working together, that he didn't need a lot of experience because of his intuition, he understood people, he was going to go meet with world leaders, look into their eyes and their souls and solve our problems! Remember that?" Clinton said in Penacook.
In a new push for young voters, she also held a roundtable with 18-to-25-year-olds with her daughter, Chelsea, talked to undecided college-age students near the University of New Hampshire in Durham, and unveiled a new "Ask Hillary" feature on her website aimed at Facebook users.
Obama, addressing an overflow crowd of more than 2,500 people at Nashua High School North, pointed to his Iowa triumph as evidence that his opponents' arguments against him, namely Clinton's charge that voting for him is a risk, carry little power in the face of a movement for change.
"This argument was made for months in Iowa," Obama said. "What the people of Iowa understood is that the real gamble is to have the same old folks doing the same old things over and over and over again."
Obama repeatedly sought to claim momentum from his win, saying, "You can feel it, you can see it."
Edwards, campaigning in Lebanon, effectively conceded he would not win New Hampshire, but told an overflow crowd of 750 people at the high school that "there will be two change agents" on the ballot Tuesday, him and Obama, and that he was the fierce anticorporate fighter the country needed. "I don't think you can nice them to death," he said.
Edwards, like his main rivals, is also running new TV ads in New Hampshire. In a spot called "Wave of Change," Edwards says children's futures are being "stolen" by big business. "Corporate greed has infiltrated everything that's happening in this democracy," he says.
Obama has two new ads running on New Hampshire TV stations. One touts his newspaper endorsements, the other celebrates his capacity to unite the country.
And Time magazine obtained what it said was a new Clinton ad that her campaign has not yet aired. The ad, posted on Time's website, shows Clinton talking directly into the camera and citing her readiness to lead.
Bryan Bender, Marcella Bombardieri, Michael Kranish, and Charlie Savage of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Material from the Associated Press was also used. Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.
