He’s losing his voice but not his enthusiasm

No letup in the last hours

After Iowa, change is in the air in New Hampshire. In the Democratic primary, Barack Obama’s emphasis on change has suddenly made him the candidate to beat. On the Republican side, Mike Huckabee has a tall order in replicating his win, but this has forced Mitt Romney to alter his tactics and helped revive John McCain’s chances. A look at the front-runners on their last full day of campaigning in New Hampshire:

--

Claremont to Lebanon to New London to Rochester and on to Concord, past a frozen river and snow-dusted forests and towns still wrapped in Christmas finery.

The polls were promising, the crowds swelling, the future just 24 hours away. But there was no time for complacency on Barack Obama’s 18-hour bus swing Monday, with four rallies and a coffeehouse drop-in.

“Do not take this race for granted,” he rasped in Claremont, looking tired and a little gaunt.

“It is important for us all to be clear that we have not won anything yet . . . in New Hampshire,” Obama said. “It is important for everybody to turn out.”

The night before, in a Keene motel room, the campaign had called a doctor to see if anything could be done about Obama’s voice, which has shown signs of strain since victory night in Iowa.

Diagnosis: Overuse.

Remedy: Rest.

Likelihood: Zip

It might have done the Democratic senator from Illinois some good to have skipped the first event of his last full day on the trail before the New Hampshire primary today.

The crowd was light, the candidate weary, the lines flubbed. “The process is a grind,” he would later acknowledge.

But he was much improved at rally No. 2, in the packed Lebanon Opera House, where about 750 voters crowded in and another 400 snaked down the street outside.

He joked about his botched lines and exhorted an adoring crowd to join him on his journey to transform politics in America, a walk on the mild side that would begin by, very simply, being nice.

“If you start off with an agreeable manner then you might be able to pick off some folks,” he said, like independents and unhappy Republicans, the building blocks of “a working majority for change.”

We are, he said, “happy warriors for change. We are cheerful about the prospects of taking over. The American people taking over their government -- what a radical proposition.”

-- Maria L. La Ganga