Twists and Turns in New Hampshire

The Democratic candidates for president barreled into New Hampshire on Tuesday in a frenetic start to a week of campaigning in what has become a topsy-turvy fight for their party’s nomination.

With Missouri Rep. Dick Gephardt dropping out of the race, the seven remaining Democrats emphatically disdained the frontrunner’s mantle, one that Howard Dean wore so uneasily in Iowa.

At a wee-hours rally on an airport tarmac in Portsmouth, Dean, who still led the pack here in the most recent polls but has been slipping, declared himself now the “underdog” and showed a more subdued face after a manic concession speech Monday night. When interrupted by two women at a rally later in the day, the former Vermont governor burst into a rendition of the “Star Spangled Banner,” the anthem quickly taken up by 200 of his supporters.

Sen. John F. Kerry, coming off a victory in Monday’s Iowa caucuses, also moved to stanch post-victory expectations. “While I may be the underdog in this fight, I have not yet begun to fight and show the full measure of what we will do,” the Massachusetts senator rasped, his voice addled by laryngitis.

Sen. John Edwards, meanwhile, reported that his second-place Iowa finish had provoked a late-night infusion of $100,000 in campaign contributions overnight. But his growing stature as a national political candidate also brought something he has rarely seen in his yearlong quest for the Democratic presidential nomination: hecklers.

The campaigns had emphatically moved east in other ways, as well, with thousands of campaign workers knocking on doors from the state’s border with Canada in the north to its border with Kerry’s home state of Massachusetts in the south to its border with Dean’s home state of Vermont in the east.

A good showing in Iowa has historically provided the candidates a small “bounce” in the primary here, but often not much more. In elections over the last three decades, the two states have rarely picked the same winner.

Although Kerry and Edwards, of North Carolina, had been rising steadily in Iowa polls as Dean faded, few predicted that Kerry would wallop Dean by nearly 20 points, garnering 37.6% of the delegates to Dean’s 17.8%. Edwards took 32% and Gephardt 10.8%.

As recently as 10 days ago, some analysts had anointed Dean the presumptive Democratic nominee. But on Tuesday, the contenders spoke of an open sprint to the Jan. 27 primary.

“New Hampshire is very volatile,” said political scientist Linda Fowler, head of the Rockefeller Center at Dartmouth College. “It was volatile before Iowa and the Iowa results certainly didn’t dampen that.”

For the most part, Dean kept his sights focused on Bush, reiterating assertions that the president does not care about ordinary Americans.

“That is the story of George W. Bush’s presidency: the scrunching down of the middle class, the pushing down and pushing back of all the gains that we’ve made since John F. Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt,” he told supporters in Manchester.

Dean offered a more subtle critique of his Democratic opponents. Without naming them directly, he questioned their credentials by emphasizing his experience as Vermont’s chief executive for 11 years.

“Oftentimes candidates that come from Washington present sitting on a committee as experience in governing and it is not,” he said.

“Experience in governing means sitting in the chair, making tough decisions.... The tough questions were not asked in Washington. I asked them.”

Dean, who is accustomed to overflowing crowds, got a moderate turnout at a rally in Concord late Tuesday afternoon, which was interrupted several times by protesters.

“Having won eight elections in a row in Vermont and not won the one last night, I can tell you it’s a lot more fun to win,” Dean admitted. “We better win in New Hampshire if we’re going to change the system,” he added.

In Concord, Dean’s appearance was disrupted three times by protesters, who screamed at the candidate as he spoke. Dean sang the national anthem to drown out two women who shouted and yanked out a Confederate flag just as Dean was criticizing Bush’s stance on affirmative action.

Dean spoke in very measured tones at the event preceding the press conference -- in stark contrast, he acknowledged, to the speech he gave following the caucuses. His high-decibel, fist-pumping rally cry was so intense that even some backers said it might have given would-be supporters pause.

“It might have worked in that room, but TV is a hot medium and for TV it was too hot,” said Dean supporter and Iowa State Democratic chairman Dave Nagle.

“Last night there were 3,500 people there who had worked for weeks in Iowa and I thought I owed them the reason they came to this campaign, which was passion,” Dean explained to reporters

Kerry began his day in New Hampshire by making the rounds of the morning talk shows. He thanked a crowd at Manchester’s airport for “welcoming back to New Hampshire Comeback Kerry.”

“Last Sunday, the New England Patriots won,” he declared. “One week from today, American patriots here in New Hampshire have an opportunity to restore fairness to America and to put the American people back in charge.”

He immediately turned his sights on retired Army Gen. Wesley K. Clark, who has surged in New Hampshire polls by campaigning exclusively in the state while other candidates concentrated on Iowa.

“I am a lifelong Democrat,” Kerry told the crowd, alluding to Clark’s registration with the party just since he started running for president. “And I have fought for 35 years for the values and priorities of our nation and our party.”

Edwards seemed buoyant, despite landing in Concord around 3 a.m. He spoke at 10 a.m. to students at Winnacunnet High School in Hampton, more than an hour’s drive away on the New Hampshire seacoast. In two appearances, Edwards stuck to the core stump speech that he used to such effect in Iowa, discussing a nation divided by class and race.

A noon speech at the Manchester Public Library was interrupted three times by two different members of the audience. One, a supporter of Lyndon LaRouche, was drowned out by the crowd chanting, “Go, John, go!” until aides removed the man.

The second man, though, drew an uncharacteristically sharp response from Edwards.

“Would you mind not interrupting me, please?” the candidate said sharply. “If you’re going to interrupt me we’re going to have to ask you to leave. We’re going to ask you to leave unless you stop interrupting me.”

Waiting for the Iowa competitors in New Hampshire were Clark and Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, whose flagging campaign desperately needs a boost here to remain competitive.

“I want you to call everyone,” Clark exhorted volunteers and staffers at his headquarters here. “I want you to ring every doorbell. And I want you to reach every heart here in New Hampshire.... Let’s get to work.”

Clark’s first stop of the day, at headquarters, came several hours after some of the arrivals from Iowa began pumping up their forces. Lieberman, whose campaign has failed to find its stride and languished in single digits in polls, hit the coffee shop circuit at 8 a.m.

None of them could predict the impact of Gephardt’s departure on the race. It leaves his home state of Missouri up for grabs. Having all but ceded the state to Gephardt before his withdrawal, contestants are now likely to battle hard for the state, which offers more delegates, 88, than any of the other six states holding primaries on Feb. 3.

Representatives of organized labor left Iowa in a state of shock, unable to entirely explain how their backing of Gephardt and Dean helped both men so little.

It seemed unlikely that any big unions that backed Gephardt would endorse another candidate.

None have the long ties with unions that Gephardt possessed or the long track record of opposition to the North American Free Trade Agreement and other free trade treaties that are anathema to many American workers.

“If Dick Gephardt hadn’t been running, I don’t think we would have endorsed anyone at all,” said Mike Mathis, director of government affairs for the International Brotherhood of Teamsters.

A spokesman said the steelworkers union would have to do some “deep-breathing exercises” to recover from the beating that its candidate took in Iowa.

Freed from any endorsement by union leaders, some analysts said that many workers might feel a natural affinity for Edwards, who touts populist themes and his background as the son of a textile mill worker.

Under a compressed schedule this campaign season, 27 states and the District of Columbia will hold primary contests by March 2, just over a month after the first primary ends here.

Which candidate has stamina to endure is an open question.

“The schedule... is just insane,” said Fowler, the political scientist. “Whoever survives it probably deserves to be president.”

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Times staff writers Scott Martelle, Nick Anderson, John Glionna, Faye Fiore and Mark Z. Barabak in Manchester contributed to this report.