Obama ready for fight in N.H.

PORTSMOUTH, N.H. — It was anyone’s guess what would win out on the campaign trail Friday with Barack Obama -- glee, fatigue or a growing pugnacity.

There he was, buoyant but baggy-eyed, fresh from a resounding victory in Iowa’s Democratic caucuses, standing in a drafty airplane hangar here and rallying a whole new set of troops.

“My throat’s still a little torn up, but my spirits are high because last night the American people began down the road to change,” he said. “And four days from now, New Hampshire, you have the chance to change America. . . . This feels good. That’s just like I imagined it when I was talking to my kindergarten teacher.”

That was a gentle swipe at rival Hillary Rodham Clinton and it came in the very first minute of his very first speech on Granite State soil. Obama was referring to a news release Clinton’s campaign circulated last month saying the Illinois senator had been plotting a run for the Oval Office since early elementary school.

Although he generally kept to the political high road, Obama in Portsmouth was a little testier than his Iowa norm. He didn’t complain at the morning rally that his rivals paint him as “too nice” to bring change to America.

Instead, Obama threaded his usual talk of hope and optimism with remarks about the need to fight in the days and weeks ahead.

“Hope is not blind optimism,” he said. “It’s not sitting on the sidelines and shirking from a fight.”

Shirking was the last thing on the campaign’s mind Friday, after Clinton operatives warned on her plane out of Des Moines that Obama’s record deserved scrutiny and a negative ad could be in the works.

“We have the means and the foundation with which to repel those attacks, and we’re not going to be passive about doing it,” a drowsy David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, told reporters after the rally.

What with jetting out of Iowa at 1 a.m. and landing in New Hampshire just before dawn, Obama was functioning on two hours’ sleep; Axelrod had but one hour.

So it was probably not a coincidence that the first campaign stop after the morning rally was a coffee house in Dover, where Obama talked healthcare with a woman in a neck brace and shook hands with a young man in a rock band.

“I wish I could go listen to music,” Obama said wistfully to singer-songwriter Aaron Katz, 31, “but they’re making me work.”

Katz lives across the street from the Clinton campaign office in Dover and has spent a lot of time with the New York senator’s New Hampshire staff members. But he has two elderly parents and likes what Obama has to say about healthcare.

“I was leaning toward him last night,” Katz said, “and all of a sudden he’s here.”

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