Candidates battle over image

By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- It is a maxim of politics that campaigns can hinge on the ability to define your opponent. So, with primary day finally here, it is time to look at how the candidates have been defined and the impact that will have on the results tonight.

If Senator John McCain wins the primary and eventually becomes president, a textbook might be written on how he managed to avoid being caught in the definition trap. Mitt Romney worked for weeks to try to define McCain as an amnesty-granting old-timer who opposed the Bush tax cuts and practically lives in a Capitol cloakroom. Yet McCain's favorability rating has remained at about 71 percent. That is a rarely achieved level for a politician. How has he managed to pull it off?

The answer seems to be that McCain is too well-known to New Hampshirites to be subject to the usual efforts of an opposing campaign to characterize him. He is not a blank slate waiting to be defined. Rare is the voter here who does not know that McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam and a politician who doesn't like pork barrel spending. He won the primary here in 2000 and, it seems, never stopped campaigning. Months ago, advisers were telling Romney to beware that McCain was the equivalent of being the "third senator from New Hampshire."

Romney, even if he wins tonight, seems to have been hurt by the way he had hurled attacks at McCain and another rival, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. After months of presenting himself as the sunny optimist, with a "Leave It To Beaver" life and an adoring family, Romney spent heavily on ads that struck many voters as especially harsh in tone and questionable in the presentation of some facts.

Romney insisted he was presenting contrasts, not making personal attacks, and that may be the case. But the contrast that many voters may have drawn was between Romney's sunny image and the tough tone of the ads. That strategy may have backfired: Romney's favorability among New Hampshire voters is 39 percent, the lowest of the seven leading candidates in both parties, according to a CNN poll.

On the Democratic side, Barack Obama is, similar to McCain, at the stratospheric level of favorability, at 72 percent, according to CNN poll. Obama's ranking reflects the outpouring of support for him and what many view as his inspirational message of hope. The question is whether that will last if he continues to be a leading candidate. Unlike McCain, Obama has not been the subject of intensive negative advertising by an opponent. Many voters know little about him. Hillary Clinton has hinted at this, saying that she has been fully vetted, implying that Obama has not. If Hillary Clinton or others launch an aggressive negative campaign against Obama, the effort to define him could play a major role in presidential race.

The 2004 campaign provides an object lesson: Senator John Kerry believed that he had carefully honed his image as a Vietnam war hero and national security expert. Then came the group called Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, which launched an all-out effort to destroy Kerry's image. Fair or not -- and Kerry to this day says the group grossly distorted his record -- the attacks hurt Kerry and may have cost him the election. In the minds of some voters, the definition of Kerry was provided by such opponents. In the 2008 race, the effort by candidates to define themselves is likely to matched by the effort to avoid being defined by others.