McCain Returns to New Hampshire

EXETER, N.H.-Senator John McCain returned on Wednesday to the state that launched his 2000 and 2008 presidential campaigns, but the nostalgic quasi-homecoming was mixed with the political reality that New Hampshire will be a hard fight for him in November.

"It's wonderful to be back," Mr. McCain told an overflowing crowd at the Exeter Town Hall. "I cannot tell you how humbled and gratified I am to be here as the nominee of the Republican Party."

Normally presidential candidates park themselves in New Hampshire in the months leading up to its first-in-the-nation primary and then rarely bother to return. But New Hampshire voters have twice saved Mr. McCain's presidential campaigns - first in 2000, when he was the upset winner over George W. Bush, and again this past January, when the state propelled him from the nearly dead to be the victor over Mitt Romney.

Many voters here have responded to Mr. McCain's preferred style of campaigning, the question-and-answer sessions in small town hall meetings, which as a practical matter was all he could afford when he was running as his party's under-financed insurgent.

"We're going to continue the town hall meeting, we're going to continue the close encounter with voters so that not only can they listen to me but I can listen to them," Mr. McCain said in a news conference after the town hall meeting. "I think it's important for politics in America for the voters to feel that they can be in touch with politicians as well as politicians being in touch with the people."

But Mr. McCain did not come back to New Hampshire on a muddy day in March merely to say thank you. The trip was also, he noted, the beginning of a general election campaign in a state that is no longer guaranteed to Republicans. President Bush won New Hampshire in 2000 but Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts won it for the Democrats in the presidential election of 2004.

This year New Hampshire Republicans are hoping that Mr. McCain will attract independents as well as the old "Reagan Democrats" who voted for the GOP's late standard bearer.
In a sign that the race is already heating up, some two dozen protestors from the state's Democratic party waved signs outside the town hall that said "Bush/McCain, More of the Same," and "Third Bush Term, New Hampshire Says No to McCain."

In addition, a group called TrueMajority.org drove a yellow Lincoln Continental pulling a faux missile on the streets around the town hall. A McCain likeness straddled the missile, much like Slim Pickens on top of the rocket in the movie "Dr. Strangelove."

Mr. McCain was regularly asked throughout the day if he would consider as his running mate Mitt Romney, who said on the Fox News Channel on Tuesday night that he would "honored" to be on the ticket with Mr. McCain.

Mr. McCain was noncommittal. "I think he's a fine man and I appreciate the enormous contribution he's made," he said at the news conference in Exeter. Mr. McCain added that Mr. Romney has "very big role to play in the Republican party in our future," but said nothing more.