'I Could Sense the Change Coming'

By KAREN TUMULTY

Senator Hillary Clinton defied the polls to best Barack Obama in New Hampshire. She spoke to TIME's Karen Tumulty on Jan. 9. Excerpts:

A lot of people thought that yesterday was not necessarily going to be a great night for you. When did you figure out that you had things going your way?

Well, I felt that way after the [Jan. 5] debate. I had nothing to prove it, but I could sense the change coming. Then we actually went out to polling places, and I looked at voters and they looked at me, I shook their hands, and we saw people just randomly. I stopped at a Dunkin' Donuts and just began to ask people to go out and vote. I really felt good. I got back to my hotel room in the afternoon, and I didn't say, "I think we're going to do really well," but I felt it.

Your performance in the debate got a lot of media attention. It seems as if the voters saw it a lot differently than the pundits did.

It just has been my experience, going back many, many years, that voters hear things and see things differently. As soon as the debate was over and I was walking off the stage, one of the cameramen grabbed my hand and said, "That was great." And then from that moment on, everywhere I went, people were telling me they really got what I was doing and they were glad I wasn't the only one that was on the hot spot for a change.

Do you look at the race differently now, and is this causing you to reassess how you pace it, how you fund it, how you plan the map?

Not really. I always assumed that it would go at least through February 5th. That's what we have been planning for. It is just too compressed a schedule to believe that it was going to be a smooth path ... so I think we're just going to keep going back and forth, and I think voters are going to be looking at both of us and trying to make up their minds, and I welcome that.

So much has been made of how you choked up in Portsmouth. What difference did it make to voters?

I think what it might have done is to put into the public arena what happens to me every single day on a private level. I have those encounters with people that touch me and really move me all the time ... I think what that moment really illustrated is, Guess what? Those of us who get up on the stage and make the speeches and shake the hands and do the interviews are also human beings.