Time to rewrite McCain's political obituary

MANCHESTER, New Hampshire (Reuters) - It is time to rewrite John McCain's political obituary.

The 71-year-old U.S. presidential hopeful's victory in New Hampshire on Tuesday means that the Republican nomination is anyone's to win 10 months before Americans elect a president.

"He came back from the dead," Mark McKinnon, McCain's senior adviser, told Fox News. "We did it with spit and glue, no money."

Six months ago McCain was counted out. Short on cash, he suffered because of his support for the Iraq war and for a plan to give illegal immigrants a pathway to U.S. citizenship.

"Tonight, we sure showed them what a comeback looks like," McCain told supporters after U.S. television networks projected him the winner. "Mac is back, Mac is back," the crowd shouted.

New Hampshire's primary is the second high-profile battleground, following Iowa, in the state-by-state process of choosing Republican and Democratic candidates for November's election to succeed President George W. Bush.

If elected to the White House, McCain would be the oldest person ever elected to a first presidential term.

Left reeling was the former governor of neighboring Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, who again finished second, as he did last week in Iowa. He needs a win in Michigan on January 15.

A third-place finish for former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee showed his limitations. He won Iowa with backing from Christian evangelicals and will now turn his attention to South Carolina on January 19.

Lurking in the background is former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, the tough-on-terrorism candidate who did not do well in New Hampshire or Iowa but has been courting Florida and the big states like New York and California that vote on February 5.

"It means the (Republican) race is still very much wide open," said Republican pollster Whit Ayres.

He spoke while still up in the air was the winner of the state's Democratic race between senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

MAVERICK

McCain is a maverick who frequently breaks with the traditional Republican leadership, including Bush.

He never wavered from his support for the Iraq war but he did bitterly criticize the past strategy engineered by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Iraq was supposed to be McCain's Achilles heel. Fortune has smiled on him.

A U.S. troop build-up has brought sufficient stability to take Iraq off the front page in the United States, and McCain is loudly declaring the policy an "I-told-you-so" success and a reason why the United States must not back down from its war on Islamic extremism.

His support for the now-dead Senate legislation that would allow 12 million illegal immigrants to work in the United States under a temporary permit is bound to come back to haunt him down the campaign trail.

Conservatives in South Carolina and other states that will be voting soon for candidates might not be as kind to him on the issue as more moderate Republicans and independents were to him in New Hampshire.

"When you get to those states where the independent vote drops and the Republican vote surges or where you have close primaries, that's where it gets tough for him (McCain)," Republican strategist Ralph Reed told CNN.

McCain won New Hampshire in 2000 and looked to be on a roll. But he stumbled in South Carolina that year and lost to Bush.

This year when he was down and considered out, he stripped down his operation and concentrated solely on New Hampshire, holding 101 town hall meetings to discuss issues and take questions from voters, many of them hostile.

He retooled himself into the 2008 version of the "happy warrior," tooling around in his "Straight Talk Express" bus.

Sometimes he had doubts he would be able to pull it off.

"I always believed we could win," McCain, an Arizona senator, told Reuters on Monday after a rally in Keene. "But I can't give you straight talk and tell you that maybe on occasion I had a couple of doubts."

(Editing by Howard Goller)

(For more about the U.S. political campaign, visit Reuters "Tales from the Trail: 2008" online at blogs.reuters.com/trail08/)