MANCHESTER, N.H. — New Hampshire proved to be the political firewall that the Clinton campaign long had hoped for. Just as New Hampshire voters saved Bill Clinton’s candidacy 16 years ago, they revived Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s faltering presidential campaign Tuesday night.
Clinton’s battle with Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., now moves to Nevada and South Carolina, then to almost two dozen states, including California, New York, New Jersey and Illinois, that will hold contests on Feb. 5. Both campaigns are ready, and with two well-liked, well-funded and determined candidates, Democrats face a battle almost unlike any they have seen in a generation.
Tuesday’s outcome defied the final poll results, which had showed Obama heading toward a handsome victory.
What arrested Obama’s surge was not clear. Some strategists speculated that it was Clinton’s performance in Saturday’s debate, where she declared that “words are not actions” and sought to refocus voters’ attention from the soaring rhetoric and energy of Obama’s candidacy and back to the nuts-and-bolts question of what it takes to produce real change — and who is better equipped to do so.
Others suggested that it was her emotional moment at a New Hampshire diner on Monday, when her voice cracked as she talked about what kept her going. That moment, played and replayed on television over the final hours of the campaign, revealed a more vulnerable side of her rarely seen before.
Whatever it was, women flocked to Clinton’s candidacy in a way they had not in Iowa. There Obama captured more of the female vote than Clinton, but in New Hampshire on Tuesday, exit polls by the National Election Pool showed Clinton winning women handily. Obama won the votes of men by about the same margin, but with women comprising more than half the electorate here, Clinton’s victory was assured.
But the key for Clinton, say veterans of past campaigns and some of her supporters, may still be her ability to articulate a rationale for her candidacy that goes beyond the assertion that her experience makes her far readier to step into the Oval Office than Obama.
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