Iowa winners seek repeat in New Hampshire

updated 10:52 p.m. ET Jan. 5, 2008

CONCORD, N.H. - Iowa caucus victories behind them, Republican Mike Huckabee and Democrat Barack Obama vowed to stick with their winning principles Friday in an abbreviated dash to the finish in New Hampshire's presidential primary campaign, facing a different political alignment and, as Huckabee put it, "only a few days to close the sale."

Mitt Romney and Sen. John McCain, GOP poll le-aders in New Hampshire, stood ready to try to douse Huckabee's "prairie fire" in a state that lacks the religious voting bloc of Iowa and has an ornery tradition of rejecting Iowa's Republican caucus winners.

"It will be a different race here," Romney said Friday. He attributed Huckabee's Iowa win largely to his background as a Southern Baptist preacher.

"Mike had a terrific base as a minister," the former Massachusetts governor told a news conference in Portsmouth, N.H. "He drew on that base, got a great deal of support from it. It was a wonderful strategy that he pursued effectively. I don't think that's the strategy that's going to work in every state."

'It's not broken, why fix it?'
Obama, the Illinois senator who punctured Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's front-runner status in his convincing Iowa win, rallied in Portsmouth and Concord. He playfully but pointedly addressed the Clinton campaign's earlier criticisms of him as an overambitious figure who wanted to be president ever since he started grade school.

Video Republican race wide open Jan. 4: The Republican race will come to a head in New Hampshire after Mike Huckabee's victory in Iowa. David Gregory reports on what's next. Nightly News

"This feels good," he told a rally in an airport hanger in Portsmouth. "This feels just like I imagined when I was talking to my kindergarten teacher." The crowd laughed. Earlier, Obama said he saw no reason to revamp his campaign for the new realities of New Hampshire: "No, it's not broken, why fix it?"

Clinton hoped to become the family's newest "Comeback Kid" in a state that revived Bill Clinton's run for the Democratic nomination in 1992.

Struggling to regain her footing, Clinton promised a rally at the Nashua airport that she would answer as many questions as possible about her candidacy in the short run to the primary, and addressed several about her electability after her Iowa defeat.

Video Democrats' frantic run to N.H. Jan. 4: With only a few short days until the New Hampshire primary, the Democratic candidates raced through the night to start campaigning before dawn today. Nightly News

"Anyone we nominate will be thrown into that blazing inferno of a general election," she said. "I've been through the fires, and it makes it far less likely they are going to be able to do to me what they intend to do to whomever we nominate." She was traveling through the state in a lavishly painted campaign bus bearing her latest slogan: "Big Challenges, Real Solutions - Time to Pick a President."

Huckabee, on the morning talk shows, pitched his tax plan to anti-tax New Hampshire Republicans, and asserted his campaign is about much more than the Christian conservatives who lifted him in Iowa. "What we're seeing is that this campaign is not just about people who have religious fervor," he said. "It's about people who love America, but want it to be better and believe that change is necessary and it's not going to happen from within Washington."

Quick turnaround
New Hampshire's primary is Tuesday, only five days after Iowa, in an unprecedented compression of the campaign calendar. McCain and Huckabee anticipated more attack ads against them.

"We're going to be certainly always holding the option of defending my record when people are misleading and distorting it," Huckabee said, in a veiled reference to Romney. "I think staying positive in Iowa, not doing the political dumpster-diving that some of the other candidates did, I believe it paid off."

McCain called Romney's attacks in Iowa "a little bit desperate. It didn't work in Iowa, I don't think it will work in New Hampshire." The Arizona senator's resurgent campaign raised him to the top of the polls against Romney in New Hampshire, with Huckabee lagging, in pre-Iowa surveys.

"We only have a few days to close the sale, but I think the momentum coming out of Iowa is going to be good for us," Huckabee said. "Then we're on to South Carolina and Florida where we're running first in the polls. We're going to have a great month." The candidates appeared on the network and cable morning talk shows.

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