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A man walks past signs for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton at a caucus location at Herbert Hoover High School in Des Moines, Iowa, Thursday. (AP Photo)

Iowa and New Hampshire are the unquestioned testing grounds for candidates in the presidential nominating process, but with more than two dozen other states holding primaries by early February this year, the Iowa-New Hampshire birthright certainly has its challengers, and critics.

The winners and losers from Thursday’s Iowa caucuses flew immediately to New Hampshire to prep for the Granite State primary, now just three days away. Spirits were soaring for winners Barack Obama on the Democratic side and Mike Huckabee on the Republican side, and confidence was shaken for those who failed to enthuse Iowa caucus-goers. Two candidates, Democrats Chris Dodd and Joe Biden, even dropped out after poor showings in Iowa.

Now candidates like Hillary Clinton, who came in third in Iowa, are putting all their chips on New Hampshire — a lot of influence for a tiny state, which doesn’t just casually affect the race for president. It demands the right to do so.

Michael Chaney, president of the New Hampshire Political Library, said the state’s high 70 percent voter participation and large number of elective offices make it uniquely suited to launch the presidential nominating process.

“We are going to defend our unique political culture tradition … and you can be guaranteed of that,” he said.

But not everyone’s as fond of the tradition as he is.

Larry Sabato, political analyst at the University of Virginia, says New Hampshire and Iowa shouldn’t feel they’re entitled to the role.

“They’re disproportionately rural, they’re not representative of America ethnically and racially. They have tiny minority populations,” he said.

Obama’s historic win in nearly all-white Iowa either challenges the diversity question, or is more impressive because of it.

And there are broadly welcomed facets to the states’ campaign traditions. New Hampshire’s custom of door-to-door and small-group campaigning, for instance, aims to let candidates with less money compete, and to this end even critics say starting the presidential season with large states would be wrong.

“We don’t want our president selected purely through television ads or airport tarmac press conferences, and that’s what you would get if the process started in California and New York and Florida,” Sabato said.

New Hampshire’s importance was solidified in 1952, when incumbent President Harry Truman refused to campaign there and lost the nomination.

Plus the state has had its shared of memorable moments. Former President George H.W. Bush’s weak performance at a 1980 debate against former President Ronald Reagan led to an eight-year wait for the Oval Office for Bush.

And former candidate Ed Muskie, whose 1972 campaign was shaken by articles that said he tearfully and emotionally reacted to negative reports about his wife, ultimately dropped out of the race after being mocked by New Hampshire’s conservative Union Leader newspaper.

Sabato suggested rotating the first primaries through different small states to overcome the sense of entitlement, or even a lottery to choose the states a month before the first primary, which could also keep the campaign trail from being two years long.

Chaney suggested, rather, rotating the second and third primaries through different states, but keeping the first in New Hampshire.

But officials in the state say the problem now is that once candidates clear the Iowa-New Hampshire hurdles, they face too many contests at once in states that have moved their primaries up.

“We have three weeks to figure out how to run simultaneously in 24 states,” Chaney said.

FOX News’ Wendell Goler contributed to this report.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 5th, 2008 at 10:16 am and is filed under Iowa, New Hampshire, Top Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.