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WASHINGTON: After an energy-sapping slog for votes across the frozen
north, White House hopefuls fanned out Thursday as the 2008
presidential race went national in a series of battleground states.
Hillary Clinton, basking in the glow of her
shock win over Barack Obama in Tuesday’s Democratic primary in New
Hampshire, was “fired up” for the battles to come after some
pundits had been busy drafting her political obituary.
The steely Clinton credited part of her New
Hampshire revival to her unvarnished inner self being exposed when
she nearly wept during a campaign stop on Monday, as she spoke of
her passion to remake America.
Unbowed by his surprise defeat in New Hampshire
and still preaching an electrifying sermon for change, Senator Obama
was to campaign Thursday in South Carolina, the first southern state
voting in the 2008 race.
At a raucous rally Wednesday in New Jersey,
Obama spoke of the physical toll that this marathon campaign is
taking: his voice was hoarse, his eyes were bleary and his back was
sore, “but my spirit is strong!”
The candidate bidding to be America’s first
black president said that he was relieved to be back in
“insurgent” mode against the Clinton machine, after his coup in
last week’s Iowa caucuses had sent expectations rocketing.
The face-to-face “retail politics” that is a
hallmark of Iowa and New Hampshire is not so easy on the larger
canvas of the bigger states, so wealthy campaigns able to blanket
the airwaves could have an edge going forward.
Obama was joining a clutch of other candidates
in South Carolina, whose potent mix of race, religion and cutthroat
politics has devastated the hopes of high-flying presidential
aspirants in the past.
Fireworks were likely as Republican candidates
prepared to hold a televised debate Thursday evening in South
Carolina, with their party’s race blown wide open by Senator John
McCain’s triumph in New Hampshire.
McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney
decamped from New Hampshire to campaign in Michigan ahead of its
primary on January 15, before heading south for the debate.
After his lavishly funded campaign foundered in
Iowa and New Hampshire, Romney must win Michigan, the state of his
birth, where his father was a popular governor before seeing his own
presidential hopes falter in 1968.
The Republican winner in Iowa, former Arkansas
Gov. Mike Huckabee, lost no time in wooing South Carolina’s
committed evangelical conservatives.
Even further south, former New York Mayor
Rudolph Giuliani remained camped out in Florida as he pursued a
high-risk strategy of bypassing the early states in the hope of
seizing the Republican mantle in later contests.
-- AFP
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