McCain, Obama are new focus of criticism by rivals in reshaped presidential race

CONCORD, N.H. — The wounded contenders of Iowa took on the presumed leaders of the pack in the New Hampshire presidential primary campaign on Friday, disparaging John McCain as a creature of Washington and signaling that Barack Obama's mantle as the agent of change is ripe for challenge.

"It will be a different race here," Romney vowed, bidding to keep his GOP campaign viable. His immediate difference: switching the focus of his criticism from the Iowa winner, Mike Huckabee, to McCain, the Arizona senator staging a 2008 revival in the state he won in 2000. Similarly, Democratic Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton made clear she considered Obama's positions fair game for attack.

"It's hard to know exactly where he stands and people need to ask that," she said. "I think everybody is supposed to be vetted and tested."

Obama, the Illinois senator who punctured 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.

"This feels good," he told a rally in an airport hangar 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?"

Romney attributed Huckabee's Iowa win largely to his background as a Southern Baptist preacher in a state with a decisive bloc of evangelical voters, an element missing in New Hampshire. "It was a wonderful strategy that he pursued effectively," he said. "I don't think that's the strategy that's going to work in every state."

In any event, New Hampshire presented a different political alignment, with precious little time for candidates to remake their campaigns and adapt. McCain and Romney have been neck and neck here in pre-Iowa surveys, with Huckabee lagging, while Clinton and Obama have topped polls on the Democratic side.

Romney said the message coming out of Iowa was a hunger for change and contended he, not the longtime Arizona senator, could make that happen.

"There's no way Senator McCain can come to New Hampshire and say he can be the candidate to change Washington," the former Massachusetts governor said. "He is Washington."

McCain called Romney's attacks against Huckabee in Iowa "a little bit desperate. It didn't work in Iowa, I don't think it will work in New Hampshire."