While Iowa winners Mike Huckabee and Barack Obama hope for the much-ballyhooed "bounce" in Tuesday's New Hampshire primary, more significant may be whether losers Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton can bounce back in the Granite State.

For Romney, the former governor of neighboring Massachusetts, the challenge is particularly critical. He must deal here not only with Huckabee but with Sen. John McCain, winner of this primary in 2000, who has been building a comeback of his own in New Hampshire.

McCain's virtual third-place tie in Iowa (with fading former Sen. Fred Thompson) should help sustain his lead in the New Hampshire polls. So should his trademark straight-talk town hall meetings around the state in the remaining hours before the primary voting.

A Huckabee victory here, where there is little of the heavy Christian evangelist support that propelled him in Iowa, would be more surprising than that success. But he won't need it to move on to his next best opportunity 11 days later in the Republican primary in South Carolina, where that base may resurface in large numbers. Romney, on the other hand, will be hard-pressed to survive another loss here, in his backyard.

As for Clinton, her devastating third-place finish in Iowa shattered any remnants of the perceived early aura of inevitability about her nomination. Her pitch that experience best qualifies her for the presidency was soundly dismissed by Iowa voters, forcing her to compete with Obama's winning call for change, already shared by John Edwards, who also edged her out in Iowa.

Both the election-night polls in Iowa and the post-mortem comments of Obama, Edwards and Clinton demonstrated how the fight for the Democratic nomination has quickly shifted to Obama's high ground. The National Election Poll, a consortium of major news organizations, found that 52 percent cited "ability to bring change" as their prime consideration, and that 51 percent of those voters backed Obama.

In same surveys, 20 percent supported Edwards and 19 Clinton. Edwards made the most of his second-place finish by lumping himself in with Obama as the agent of change, declaring that "the status quo lost and change won. We saw two candidates who thought their money made them inevitable," presumably referring to Clinton and Romney. Here in New Hampshire, Edwards has a new slogan: "Real Change Starts Now — Join the Fight for the Middle Class."

Clinton herself climbed aboard the change bandwagon, saying of the Iowa vote: "We're sending a clear message that we are going to have change and that change will be a Democratic president in the White House in 2009." But she also reverted to her experience argument, adding: "And who will be the best president on day one? I am ready for that contest."

Lost in all the focus on change was the significant issue of the war in Iraq, supported by all the Republican candidates except libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, and opposed by all Democratic candidates. Changing the war, however, was implicit in the Democratic attack on the status quo.

There wasn't much mention, either, of gender or race in the Democratic caucuses, despite the fact that the first serious female and African-American contenders were running. In a state with a miniscule black population, Obama seemed to allude to his race in observing: "They said this day would never come." In marking his victory "a defining moment in history," he declared: "We are one nation. We are one people. And our time for change has come."

Here in New Hampshire, where the electorate also is overwhelmingly white, Obama can reinforce that message with a repeat victory on Tuesday, before the Democratic campaign moves to Michigan on Jan. 15 and to South Carolina on Jan. 26. There, a heavily African-American population could offer a major test of Obama's appeal with that constituency, which has always demonstrated strong allegiance to Bill Clinton, now campaigning hard for his wife.

Voters in New Hampshire, as much as 40 percent of them declared independents, like to say what happens in Iowa doesn't affect their own decisions. Romney and Clinton both must fervently hope that is so, but the odds on Tuesday may be against them.

Jules Witcover's latest book, on the Nixon-Agnew relationship, "Very Strange Bedfellows," has just been published by Public Affairs Press. You can respond to this column at juleswitcover@earthlink.net.