CONCORD, N.H. -- With his campaign seemingly in shambles, Sen. John McCain returned yesterday to the state where he once caught fire, hoping to re-ignite his candidacy.
In his first campaign appearance since he dropped his campaign manager and chief strategist this week, McCain drew a huge contingent of national and local reporters as he addressed the Greater Concord Chamber of Commerce about the war in Iraq.
The news media were on a death watch, but the subject refused to comply.
"We go to the town hall meetings, we fix our financial difficulties and we win," McCain said matter-of-factly as he explained his new, pared-down strategy targeting New Hampshire, South Carolina and Iowa. "We'll win almost the same way we won in 2000."
The press, however, was skeptical.
"Are there any circumstances you could imagine in which you would drop out," he was asked.
"Contracting a fatal disease," McCain shot back.
Eight years ago, he was the bad boy of the Republican Party, dispensing "straight talk" wherever he went and upending the presidential front-runner to win the New Hampshire primary.
But now, the Arizona Republican finds himself in difficult straits. He is running fourth in the polls here, trailing an individual, former Tennessee Sen. Fred Thompson, who hasn't even entered the race. He has little money to pay for gas in his famous Straight Talk Express bus, let alone television ads. And he's at odds with voters on two key important issues of the day - immigration and the war.
McCain favors a broad overhaul of immigration policy that would allow illegal immigrants to pursue a path to citizenship, and he has argued strenuously against giving up in Iraq and giving in to extremists.
"My position on immigration was obviously not helpful with the Republican base," he acknowledged. "My position on the war in Iraq is at least not helpful with independents. But I take responsibility for those positions."
As he pursues the GOP nomination, McCain has laid off more than half his staff, and more are expected to leave in the coming days. He has only a little more than $200,000 in the bank after debts are counted, but he is sanguine all the same.
"In New Hampshire, the sense I get is that people don't have the confidence in Senator McCain the candidate that they did in 2000," said Richard Ashooh, a Republican activist who backed George W. Bush then but is uncommitted now.
Andrew Smith, director of the University of New Hampshire Survey Center, said his polling shows that there is one category McCain wins hands down compared to former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani and Thompson.
Asked if there is any candidate they would not support under any circumstances, likely Republican voters overwhelmingly chose McCain.
"He's kind of the opposite of a snowball going downhill," Smith said. "He's continuing to lose strength both financially as well as with public support."
But Smith's polling also shows that 80 percent of likely Republican voters have not decided whom to support, giving McCain a shot at a comeback.
"We just have to get back to basics," said Michael Dennehy, a senior aide who ran the New Hampshire campaign for McCain eight years ago and who wants to put him in front of the voters, unfiltered by the prism of the press.
Jill Zuckman writes for the Chicago Tribune.