NASHUA - Facing what many analysts believe is a must-win New Hampshire primary tomorrow, Senator Hillary Clinton has stepped up her assaults against her Democratic rivals, questioning their records, their resolve, and their ability to deliver on their promises of change.
Clinton yesterday expanded on her criticism of Senator Barack Obama and former senator John Edwards in Saturday night's Democratic debate, highlighting Obama's past shifts on major issues and accusing both rivals of preaching empty rhetoric.
The race, she told a rally at Nashua High School North, hinges on this question: "How will we bring about change by making sure we nominate and elect a doer, not a talker?"
The implication was clear, and it reflects the major fault line in the Democratic race. Clinton contends that while her opponents give inspiring speeches about changing Washington, she has a long record of actually changing people's lives - bringing healthcare, for example, to low-income children and military veterans.
Clinton has spent much of the campaign seeking to be the candidate of both change and experience, at times uncomfortably. But she and her campaign have concluded that her best shot at winning the nomination that once seemed hers to lose is to link the two, while contrasting her track record with those of Obama and Edwards.
Glendora Solomon, a 43-year-old from Nashua who works for Fidelity Investments, said Clinton's message resonated with her.
"I think we need change and I think Hillary is the woman to do it," said Solomon, who attended the Nashua rally.
Solomon said she knows from experience. Her three children, she said, all received care under the State Children's Health Insurance Program, which Clinton helped establish when her husband was president.
"She was fighting for it back then," Solomon said.
Tracking polls continue to show Clinton and Obama battling for first, though he appears to have the momentum after winning Thursday's Iowa caucuses, where she finished third behind Edwards. A CNN/WMUR poll, released last evening and conducted Saturday and early yesterday, gave Obama a 39 percent to 29 percent lead over Clinton, with Edwards at 16 percent. That represented a 6-percentage-point jump for Obama and a 4-percentage-point drop for Clinton from a day earlier. Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico was fourth with 7 percent.
With their positions more or less staked out at this point, the leading Democratic candidates are angling for the remaining undecided voters and seeking to claim momentum. All the campaigns are keenly attuned to what the media will report about their events - from the crowd sizes to the energy.
Clinton's boisterous Nashua rally yesterday was in the same gym where Obama spoke the day before. An impressive-looking column of supporters extended from the high school before Clinton's event. But once everyone was inside, Obama's event appeared to have been bigger. Obama's campaign counted about 3,500 at its rally, and Clinton's campaign said 3,000 came to hers.
Obama, in several appearances across southern New Hampshire yesterday, rebutted Clinton's assertion that her opponents were raising people's "false hopes."
"This whole notion of false hopes bothers me," he said. "There is no such thing as false hopes. We can focus and get things done."
Later, in Derry, Obama said: "We don't need leaders who are telling us what we can't do. We need a president who tells us what we can do."
Karyn O'Neil, a 43-year-old banker from Manchester who came to see Obama yesterday, said Obama clinched her vote when he made his speech in a joint appearance last month with Oprah Winfrey. "He made me cry, he moved me," she said. "I had been leaning towards Hillary, and I said to my husband, 'Hillary has never made me cry.' "
Former senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, who almost toppled Al Gore in the 2000 New Hampshire primary, is scheduled to campaign for Obama today.
Clinton and her campaign yesterday sought to highlight aspects of Obama's and Edwards's records that they said contradicted their messages. Speaking of Obama, she said, "If you gave a speech, and a very good speech, against the war in Iraq in 2002, and then by 2004 you're saying you're not sure how you would have voted, and by 2005, 2006, 2007 you vote for $300 billion for the war you said you were against, that's not change."
The two campaigns sparred further over Iraq, an issue that has not been at the forefront in recent weeks. Clinton, who voted in 2002 for the Senate resolution authorizing the invasion, told supporters in Nashua, "After 9/11, I never would have taken the United States to war in Iraq, I would've stayed focused on Afghanistan, because the real threat was coming from there."
Obama spokesman Bill Burton responded by accusing Clinton of trying to "rewrite history."
"It's hard to believe she didn't know what would happen after she voted for a resolution with the title 'A Resolution to Authorize the Use of United States Armed Forces Against Iraq,' " he said in a statement.
Edwards spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at an appearance in Manchester, renewing his argument that his opponents either did not represent change or were not ready to go to war against powerful interests.
"This is not about plans," he told reporters. "This is about whether you're personally willing to fight for the change we need."
In an emotional appearance, Edwards introduced as supporters the family of a California teenager who died last month after the family's health insurance company initially refused to pay for her liver transplant. The insurance company agreed to fund the treatment shortly before she died.
"I feel empty inside. My heart is a hole," said a tearful Hilda Sarkisyan, mother of 17-year-old Nataline Sarkisyan. "They cannot tell us who's going to live and who's going to die."
The Edwards campaign said the Sarkisyans had contacted the senator, and offered to come campaign with him. After Clinton, during Saturday night's debate, linked the Sarkisyans' case with Edwards's failure as a senator to get a patients' bill of rights bill signed into law, Edwards said Clinton's campaign "doesn't seem to have a conscience."
Edwards also launched a round-the-clock, 36-hour tour across the state leading up to tomorrow's vote and unveiled a new 60-second TV spot that will begin airing today. "I may be an underdog in this campaign, running against two candidates with $200 million between them, but the real underdogs are the middle class and the voiceless in this country," he says in ad.
Marcella Bombardieri, Sasha Issenberg, and Susan Milligan of the Globe staff contributed to this report. Scott Helman can be reached at shelman@globe.com.
