After Iowa Victory, Kerry Faces Round 2

Maybe it was the bitter cold, which made the candidate’s breath puff out like a cloud of celebratory cigar smoke. Maybe it was the unruly scrum of media, 52 television cameras alone, following him through the auto shop, turning a photo opportunity into a dog pile.

Or maybe it was the question tossed out to Sen. John F. Kerry over the crush of bodies: “How are you going to draw distinctions between you, Sen. [John] Edwards and Gen. [Wesley K.] Clark?”

It was Tuesday morning and abundantly clear: The fabric of the Democratic primaries had changed. Kerry won the all-important Iowa caucuses. Former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean was no longer the presumed frontrunner.

And the small, polite group of reporters who traveled with the Massachusetts senator for weeks and months swelled to an unwieldy crush overnight.

Kerry touched down, tired but triumphant, on the tarmac of the Manchester Airport on Tuesday, eight hours after declaring victory in the first-in-the-nation Iowa caucuses and flying through the night to campaign here.

The Boston Herald, clutched in the hand of a television reporter going live, used “Shocker” as the headline below a picture of the buoyant Kerry. The crowd at the early-morning airport rally welcoming him was a little thin for a just-crowned victor -- several hundred supporters and a lot of empty space in an airport hangar at 7:30 a.m.

They were no less adoring than in Davenport, Iowa, turning a regular Kerry line into a boisterous welcome chant: “Bring it on! Bring it on!”

But they were a lot more wary about their candidate’s chances here. Kerry trails Dean in one recent poll, and both Dean and Clark in another poll, leading up to the nation’s first primary election Tuesday.

“We’re going to have to fight for every vote in New Hampshire,” said Judy Reardan, a senior advisor to Kerry in the state, waiting for him to come out and speak after he taped interviews for television’s morning shows.

“Our job this week is to get the message out.”

Supporter Chris Canfield, a middle school teacher who drove two hours from Tanworth, N.H., to greet Kerry at the airport, described a victory in the New Hampshire primary as a “huge job” for Kerry but a possible one. With Rep. Dick Gephardt and former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun out of the race, Canfield noted, there are six candidates left for Kerry to vanquish.

“He’s a warrior,” Canfield said. “There are now six bars ahead of him. When he gets through those bars, I pity Bush.”

Talking to reporters Monday night in the lull between realizing victory and declaring it to the world, the candidate insisted that John Kerry in New Hampshire would sound an awful lot like John Kerry in Iowa:

“I’m here to win,” he said then, flushed and surrounded by family. “I’m going to win for America because I’m convinced we can do a better job.

“This is not regionalized. It’s not tailored. It’s from my gut.”

But there were subtle changes in the consistent message that had powered Kerry to success.

Gone from his campaign speech were the references to family farms and soy lubricants, ethanol and hog lots. In their place Kerry gave an invigorated version of his usual paean to the environment in speeches a little scrambled from fatigue.

At the morning rally at the Manchester airport and later at a chili feed at Pembroke Academy, he talked about how fuel additives have tainted the water in “this great state, which loves the environment.”

With President Bush poised to give the final State of the Union address of his first term, Kerry used that upcoming speech Tuesday as a new entree to attack the president and the Republican’s fitness to serve.

“Get ready,” he said. “He will start to talk tonight about the things he’s been listening to the Democrats talk about.... Tonight he will begin to talk about the things he should have been talking about when he raised his hand and became president.”

Kerry reached out to veterans. He vowed to fight lobbyists. He declared that he was the most experienced man for the job. He answered repeated questions about the high cost of prescription drugs. He defined the difference between himself and his rivals as one of vision, one of experience.

He also took a small, oblique jab at Clark, a retired Army general who is coming on strong in New Hampshire after opting out of Iowa.

“I am a lifelong Democrat,” he said in Manchester, making a veiled reference to the fact that Clark had supported Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan in the past. “And I have fought for 35 years for the values and priorities of our nation and our party.”

His normally angular face was sunken and his recently crackly voice was strained. Buoyed by victory, but slammed with fatigue, Kerry described the task ahead, for himself and the Democratic Party:

“One week from tonight, New Hampshire can set the country on the course of beating George Bush,” he said. “One year from today, a new president will raise his hand and take the oath of office as president of the United States. One week, one year, one chance to change America.”