KEY POINTS:
NASHUA - The race for the White House took a sharply personal turn yesterday as Senator Hillary Clinton fought to hold back the tide of a surging Barack Obama.
As new polls showed the Illinois Senator busting open a double-digit lead over his rival in New Hampshire, the former First Lady - with her political life on the line - blasted some of her heaviest attacks against Obama in the months-long campaign.
A loss in New Hampshire tomorrow would be a significant blow to the New York senator's drive to become the first woman US President.
At a raucous rally in a high school gymnasium in Nashua, Clinton skewered Obama for several votes he has cast in the Senate, such as his vote in favour of the Patriot Act and for energy legislation she described as "Dick Cheney's energy bill". She never mentioned Obama's name but left no doubt about whom she was discussing.
"You campaign in poetry, you govern in prose," Clinton said.
"We need a President who knows how to govern, who will bring us together as a country to find common ground, but who also knows how to stand our ground."
She raised questions about his voting record on Iraq. "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 then by 2005, 6 and 7 you vote for US$300 billion for the war you said you were against, that's not change!"
The naked criticism is an abrupt change for the Clinton campaign. Obama, seeking to be the first black United States president, built on his victory in Iowa last week with a significant bounce in New Hampshire.
In the hotly contested Republican race, Arizona Senator John McCain leaped ahead of former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, even as Romney tried to raise doubts about him.
A USA Today/Gallup poll said Obama had a 13-point lead over Clinton in New Hampshire, 41 per cent to 28 per cent, to 19 per cent for former North Carolina Senator John Edwards. A WMUR/CNN tracking poll showed Obama leading Clinton, 39 to 29 per cent. Earlier polls had shown the race to be a Clinton-Obama dead heat.
Obama, speaking at a packed Manchester theatre, took issue with Clinton's criticism of him during Sunday's Democratic presidential debate. "One of my opponents said we can't just, you know, offer the American people false hopes about what we can get done.
"The real gamble in this election is to do the same things, with the same folks, playing the same games over and over and over again and somehow expect a different result," he said.
"That is a gamble we cannot afford, that is a risk we cannot take. Not this time. Not now. It is time to turn the page."
Clinton said that although Obama talks a lot about changing the US, she believes she has actually carried out change. Change from the Bush Administration is a leading theme in the presidential campaign.
"It is about how we bring about change by making sure we nominate and elect a doer and not a talker, that we begin to separate out rhetoric from reality," Clinton told the large, enthusiastic gathering in Nashua, where the overflow crowd matched the spillover audience the Illinois senator drew a day earlier.
Accusing Obama and Edwards of not showing leadership on a litany of issues, she said, "That's not change."
Obama, at a rally at a high school in Salem, fired back: "We don't need our leaders telling us what we can't do. We need our leaders to believe in what we can accomplish."
Clinton and Romney have been working to revitalise their campaigns after disappointing showings in Iowa.
"If the campaign doesn't evolve, it probably is dead," she said. "And I don't intend for it to be anything other than a winning campaign."
Obama received the endorsement of former New Jersey Senator Bill Bradley, who finished a close second to then Vice-President Al Gore in the 2000 Democratic primary here.
The USA Today/Gallup poll said McCain had taken the lead over Romney, 34 per cent to 30 per cent. A win for McCain in New Hampshire would be a remarkable turnaround for him after his campaign suffered money problems last summer and was all but given up for dead.
Romney, who would be the first Mormon President, needs to do well in New Hampshire to maintain his credibility after losing to former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee in Iowa.
At a rally in Nashua, Romney said he doubted McCain would stand up well against Obama, who he said was succeeding against veteran Democratic senators in the race.
"Are we going to do the same thing and put another long-serving US senator up against him for him to talk about? Or are we going to put somebody - I hope it's me - somebody who has spent his lifetime not just in politics, not in Washington, but changing things?" Romney said.
Clinton told one questioning voter that Russian President Vladimir Putin "doesn't have a soul".
"Bush really premised so much of our foreign policy on his personal relationships with leaders, and I just don't think that's the way a great country engages in diplomacy.
"This is the President that looked in the soul of Putin, and I could have told him, he was a KGB agent," Clinton said. "By definition he doesn't have a soul ... This is nonsense, but this is the world we're living in."
Her comments, which drew laughs from the crowd, referred to Bush's remark on first meeting Putin in 2001: "I was able to get a sense of his soul."
Critics have called the remark naive of Bush, to think the Russian leader was committed to democratic change.
QUOTES
"It is about how we bring about change by making sure we nominate and elect a doer and not a talker, that we begin to separate out rhetoric from reality.
You campaign in poetry, but you govern in prose. We need a President who knows how to govern, who will bring us together as a country to find common ground, but who also knows how to stand our ground."
- Hillary Clinton
"For many months I have been teased, almost derided for talking about hope. We saw it in the debate last night when one of my opponents said we can't just offer the American people "false hopes" of what we can give them. False hopes?
We don't need our leaders telling us what we can't do. We need our leaders to believe in what we can accomplish."
- Barack Obama
- REUTERS
