Washington - Fighting to regain the lead among Democratic presidential hopefuls, Hillary Clinton attacked her rivals Saturday as phony merchants of change and accused surging Barack Obama of shifting positions on major issues. Three days before New Hampshire holds the first primary of the 2008 election cycle, Clinton faced intense pressure to bounce back from a third-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. Brushing off Obama's message of change as vague, she insisted that only she had the experience to run the world's mightiest nation.
"You know, words are not action," the former first lady said during a televised debate with her three top rivals at a university in Manchester, New Hampshire. "What we need to do is translate talk into action, translate feeling into reality. And I have a long record of doing that."
"I embody change," she said. "I think having the first woman president is a huge change."
Responding to questions by ABC television's Charles Gibson, all four Democrats seeking the party's presidential nomination pledged to bring US troops home from Iraq, retaliate forcefully if terrorists staged "a nuclear attack on an American city" and do more to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Obama stood by a statement that he would attack al-Qaeda inside Pakistan if he had "actionable intelligence."
Obama, 46, won the opening Democratic contest in Iowa after telling Americans he would work to overcome partisan divisions and unite the country to tackle big problems such as health-care reform.
His youth, stirring rhetoric of hope and relatively short time in Washington helped give him the early boost in the battle to become the Democratic candidate in the November 4 election.
But Clinton, 60, charged Obama changed positions on health care, war spending for Iraq and anti-terrorism legislation during three years in the US Senate. Obama, trying to stay above the fray and on his positive message, urged her "not to distort each other's records."
Polls show Clinton's edge over Obama in New Hampshire melting as Tuesday's vote approaches.
In a sharpening three-way battle for New Hampshire voters, former senator John Edwards, the Iowa runner-up, came to Obama's defence. He suggested that Clinton, a US senator for New York state for the past eight years, was getting desperate.
"I didn't hear these kind of attacks from Senator Clinton when she was ahead," said Edwards, who has built his campaign on protecting middle-class Americans against the influence of Washington lobbyists and big corporations.
Again and again, Clinton sought to puncture Obama's momentum and his message, which has resonated especially among younger voters. She got the audience laughing after playing on Obama's charisma and her own often-cited image as cool and bookish.
"He's very likeable. I agree with that," she said. "I don't think I'm that bad. I really think the most important question is who is ready to be president on day one."
After Iowa's less formal preference poll, Democrats and Republicans separately hold their first primaries Tuesday in New Hampshire. A series of state-by-state contests quickly follow, including the crucial February 5balloting when nearly two dozen states hold primaries.
In the first Republican debate since the Iowa polls, White House hopeful Mike Huckabee continued to distance himself from US President George W Bush's war in Iraq, saying he would use military force only with "strength and understanding."
Three other leading Republican contenders - US Senator John McCain, former governor Mitt Romney and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani - backed Bush's foreign policies and praised him for defining the fight against radical Islam as the most important issue of the century.
Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor who won the Republican contest in Iowa, dominated the foreign policy discussion along with McCain. Huckabee,52, lags fourth in New Hampshire opinion polls, and McCain, 71, who leads with 33 per cent.
With Bush's popularity in a slump over the war in Iraq, Republican candidates have been reluctant to identify with his policies. But they responded Saturday to challenges by Gibson, who chaired both debates.
Huckabee, 52, a Baptist minister who has chided the Bush administration for an "arrogant bunker mentality," criticized Bush for allowing US troops to go to war in Iraq without the full level of troops recommended by Pentagon generals.
