Senator John McCain, winner of the 2000 Republican presidential primary, returned to New Hampshire yesterday to reintroduce himself to voters as a candidate for the White House. McCain said dramatic changes since his last campaign have made the 2008 election even more important - and convinced him that he is more ready to be president.

"My life has prepared me to lead this nation," McCain said last night at a house party in Bow, setting up a line he used repeatedly yesterday: "I don't need any on-the-job training."

McCain said his experience - in the House and Senate, and as a Vietnam combat veteran and former prisoner of war - has prepared him to lead in the new environment. Since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he said, the United States has been engaged in "a titanic struggle between everything we stand for and believe in" and an "implacable enemy."

At the same time, McCain did not pin the notion of his readiness strictly to military and geopolitical affairs. At a pair of town hall meetings, he spent more time talking about his plans to reform immigration, rein in federal spending and address climate change than he did on the Iraq war. He also stressed his love for New Hampshire's traditional leadoff primary and vowed to keep it first, to preserve the retail politics and human interaction it brings to the presidential election process.

As president, "I will do everything in my power to preserve the first-in-the-nation status of New Hampshire," he told a crowd of over 200 at a school gymnasium in Lebanon yesterday afternoon.

Last time, McCain began with negligible support -"we started out with a 3 percent approval rating, (and) that was in a poll with a 5 percent margin of error" - and held his first New Hampshire campaign event at an American Legion hall, speaking to a handful of veterans. That was long before the "Straight Talk Express," the campaign coach bus that McCain rode to a dizzying number of town meeting stops. His campaign gained momentum through grassroots politicking and continuous touring, with New Hampshire voters embracing McCain as a maverick and candid critic of Washington.

Instead of a rented van, McCain began the 2008 primary season yesterday riding in the "Straight Talk Express," amid a flotilla of vehicles that included a coach to carry national media, a series of staff vans and a dedicated plow truck, which led the way in the snowy early going. He immediately acknowledged the differences between 1999 and 2007, and said he would take nothing for granted this time, despite the elevated status and expectations surrounding his campaign.

"It's really wonderful to be back to see old friends and to get the feeling again for the town-hall meetings," McCain, a fourth-term Arizona senator, told a crowd of about 100 invited guests in Bow at the home of Shawn and Jayne Millerick. "And I also remember we are starting all over, and if anybody doesn't start all over in New Hampshire, it's at great risk to their political future."

McCain beat eventual nominee George W. Bush in New Hampshire in 2000, and he was an early and consistent critic of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war. But among the 2008 hopefuls, none right now is more closely linked than McCain to Bush on the war. McCain supports the president's much-debated plan to send more than 21,000 additional troops to Iraq. He spoke carefully about the war at each stop yesterday, never mentioning troop numbers or the word "surge," as the president has characterized his increase. He repeatedly called the war "very badly mismanaged" but was reluctant to dwell on the past.

"We're all sad, we're all frustrated, and we all feel terrible about what has happened over the last four years in Iraq," he said. "But the key to it is to fix it, and that's why I think this is the right strategy now, and I strongly support the president in this strategy. And I don't want to look back in anger, but I do believe that we can succeed."

McCain said the president's plan represents the last possibility for success. It would require using the country's forces not just to fight enemy combatants but to remain in position with U.S. and Iraqi forces to stabilize areas and allow the economic and political process to develop. Although it may not work, the country can't afford not to try, he said.

"When we lost and came home in Vietnam, it was over," he said. But with Islamic terror groups in Iraq, "this is evil that we're facing, and it isn't Iraq they want, it's us they're after. So please have no doubt about what's at stake here."

McCain was critical of the various nonbinding plans debated in Congress about troop levels and withdrawal. If members of Congress believe the war is failing and that it is wasting lives and resources, "they should have the intellectual courage to cut off the funding," he said.

He said he recognized that anti-war sentiment was particularly strong in New Hampshire. However, he disputed the notion that the war was the primary motivation for voters to defeat Republican incumbents here and nationally in the 2006 elections.

"I don't accept that theory," he said. "The reason why Republicans stayed home and Republicans turned against us is that we let spending get out of control, and we spent money like drunken sailors, and we presided over the biggest increase in the size of the government since the Great Society, and it's got to stop."

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