NH poll shows Obama and McCain rising -- and leads to criticism of Barack's health care plan

A new day, and the bad New Hampshire polls keep coming for Hillary Clinton and Mitt Romney. This time, it's from the Boston Globe.

Democrats

• Obama and Clinton are in a statistical toss-up with Obama up 30% to 28%. Edwards gets14%and Richardson 7%.

In the last Boston Globe poll in the beginning of November, Clinton was up 35% to 21% -- and that was already considered a tightening of the race. Look at my write-up from November 11th: "Make it three: Clinton sliding in yet another New Hampshire poll" It is telling how things have changed since then. The state that was once Clinton sure firewall in case of an Iowa stumble could now be her deathbed if she loses in the caucuses.

One internal numbers shows that a plurality of Democrats say they oppose mandates on health care. This has obviously been a huge debate on the campaign trail -- one of the only major policy disagreements that have been debated in the past few weeks.

There has been mounting criticism in the past months that Obama is giving Republicans arguments they will use in the health care battle that will follow a Democrat victory in 2008. Paul Krugman has been relentlessly hitting Obama for echoing right-wing rhetoric on health care, but this new poll that has Democratic voters opposing mandates is the most recent evidence that Obama is leading public opinion in the wrong direction -- and is convincing them of what Republicans like to argue: choice is important, forced governmental programs are dangerous, etc. Here's a short excerpt from MyDD:

In the event of an Obama presidency, Obama will have already conceded the point on a mandate, potentially opening the door for a system that is not truly universal in that more than 10 million Americans might not be covered. And because the American system generally requires compromise (notwithstanding the petulance of the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.), starting positions matter greatly. By taking a starting point that arguably incorporates something less than a system with full universality and taking off the table a system with an individual mandate -- in a sense, by already compromising with the right even before the debate has begun -- Obama has greatly increased the likelihood that an eventual compromise bill stops far short of full universality.
Even more troublesome, Obama may have also helped take a mandate off the table for other potential Democratic presidents, particularly Clinton and Edwards, both of whom incorporate a personal mandate into their plan. If a majority of Democrats don't support a mandate, then there's just no way that a program with a mandate is going to make it through Congress.

Republicans

• Mitt Romney is now barely ahead of McCain: 28% to 25%, with Giuliani down at 14% and Huckabee getting 10%.
• 6 weeks ago, Romney was massively on top, 32% to Giuliani's 21% and McCain's 17%. These trend-lines are very much a confirmation of everything we've seen in the past 2 weeks.

It is really no surprise that Romney is now going after McCain given that he is sinking fast in New Hampshire. Just like Clinton, Romney could now be eliminated in the state in which he was pretty much sure he would win.

And to make matters worse for Romney, the Concord Monitor has just anti-endorsed him, calling him a phony candidate that New Hampshire has to stop. Romney "most surely must be stopped, they say, calling NH to "vote no." They basically accuse him of artificially having built himself up in the past few years as the ideal conservative candidate. It's really a hilarious must-read editorial that McCain has already started circulating.

We have now reached Christmas, which means numbers are unlikely to change much anywhere until January 3rd. Given that Iowa is tied, it means that if Obama or Clinton wins Iowa they will surely boost themselves up to a New Hampshire victory 5 days later. And if except if Edwards pulls through, we are in for an all-out NH brawl. Among the GOP, Romney would surely pull through if he comes in first in Iowa, but is it realistic to expect him to hold off McCain if he can't even win in Iowa? We'll soon know -- 9 more days to Iowa!