Amid calls for change, the tension is building

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Now, it's all about change.

The five-day campaign here leading to Tuesday's primary is a supercharged blur of candidates trying to apply the lessons of last week's Iowa caucuses. Iowa's winners — Democrat Barack Obama and Republican Mike Huckabee — are pressing to shake up the status quo in Washington. Now, the exchanges among candidates in debates, on TV and at rallies are increasingly caustic, reflecting the likelihood that the voting here will end some candidacies and ignite others.

The stakes here are particularly high for a pair of onetime New Hampshire front-runners: Democrat Hillary Rodham Clinton and Republican Mitt Romney. He lags behind Arizona Sen. John McCain by 4 percentage points in a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll taken Friday through Sunday. Clinton, deadlocked with Obama here just three weeks ago, trails him by 13 points.

An Obama victory here would put history on his side. For more than three decades, every presidential contender who managed to win both Iowa's caucuses and New Hampshire's primary has gone on to claim their party's nomination.

Everyone seems to have learned the same lesson from Iowa: Voters want someone to change things in Washington. During televised debates Saturday night, Democrats used the noun "change" 61 times, Republicans 30.

The battle cries at rallies here for Clinton — who has stressed her experience in government and as first lady — are beginning to sound more and more like Obama's. "Are you ready for change?" state Sen. Sylvia Larsen asked an overflow crowd for Clinton in Penacook. Romney, meanwhile, adapted a line from Obama's stump speech: "Sending back the same old people just in different chairs is not going to fix Washington," he said in Derry.

"This change thing must be catching on because now everybody's talking about change," Obama joked in Nashua. "That's OK. We want everybody on the change bandwagon."

But Clinton must cope with long odds in her attempt to persuade voters that she's the face of change, says Elizabeth Ossoff, a political psychology specialist at Saint Anselm College here. Given the few days between the Iowa and New Hampshire votes, "the time pressure is very tough," Ossoff says, especially because most people don't watch the news on weekends.

And although Clinton's husband, former president Bill Clinton, is a great campaigner, "he's a reminder of what was" and Hillary Clinton's connection to the past, Ossoff says.

Joe Keefe, a former state party chairman here who endorsed Obama over the weekend, says most Democrats would have no problem with her as the party's nominee. "She's well-loved, highly regarded and incredibly capable," he says. "But Obama is tapping into something. People see him as a transitional, potentially transformational figure."

As the stakes in New Hampshire's primary have become clear — especially for Clinton — crowds for both Obama and Clinton have strained the capacities of town halls and high school gyms here. Clinton persuaded the fire marshal in Penacook to let in more people massed in the hallway and on the sidewalk outside. Among Republicans, McCain — who won here in 2000 and finished behind Huckabee and Romney in Iowa — also draws overflow crowds.

The atmosphere of the campaigns in New Hampshire is intense and personal. Romney is on the defensive against attacks by Huckabee and McCain. The Clinton camp, struggling to recover from a third-place finish in Iowa behind Obama and John Edwards, hastily scheduled a conference call Sunday with reporters to denounce Obama as all talk and no action.