Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., trailed by his wife, Cindy, makes his way through a media scrum on his way to a campaign appearance yesterday in Salem, N.H. The senator largely bypassed Iowa to concentrate his campaign efforts in New Hampshire. The Providence Journal / Gretchen Ertl

SALEM, N.H. — Time has thinned the nimbus of white hair and leavened his irreverence; the maverick mischief-maker of 2000 is no more.

Yet, as Sen. John McCain tries one last time for the White House and the resurrection of a campaign that was consigned to history’s dustbin six months ago, the Arizona Republican’s moment may have finally arrived.

As the hours dwindle to tomorrow’s leadoff New Hampshire primary, polls show McCain is in a good position to win the contest and catapult to the top of the GOP presidential pack.

McCain is drawing big crowds all across snow-covered New Hampshire and is reveling in the meet-and-greet and question-and-answer retail politics that is the foundation of New Hampshire presidential campaigns. Yesterday, more than 1,000 voters jammed a middle school gymnasium in this Massachusetts border town to hear McCain deliver his stump speech, a paean to the military values of duty and honor, then patiently disarm some hecklers and take questions from the crowd.

Always at ease in front of a microphone, McCain is introduced, as he often was in his unsuccessful 2000 presidential campaign, by his wife, Cindy McCain. She thanks New Hampshire voters for taking politics so seriously, then mentions “those of us who have children serving” in the military.

McCain never mentions it, but he has two sons in the military, one a Marine stationed in Afghanistan and the other a senior at Annapolis. What Cindy McCain doesn’t say in her brief reference is that McCain’s chief rival in tomorrow’s election, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, has several young male children of military age but none has ever served.

Military veterans are a core support group for McCain, the nation’s most famous prisoner of the Vietnam War. He is often accompanied, as he was yesterday, by compatriots from his days as a POW.

“We slept side by side for a couple of years … he was my roommate for two and a half years” in the notorious Hanoi Hilton, says Orson Swindle, who adds quickly that his name is “pronounced as in crook.”

At 71, McCain is the oldest of the major candidates in either party vying for the White House. In a year when “change” has become the political flavor of the day, McCain supporters say they are attracted by qualities they view as immutable: his consistency, judgment and experience.

“Being president means you are commander-in-chief, and I believe John McCain has the best credentials,” says John Hardacre, a vocational education teacher from nearby Atkinson. “I think he is honest and is probably the best qualified to deal with the international situation we find ourselves in.”

An early critic of President Bush’s Iraq War strategy, McCain emerged last year as an enthusiastic supporter of Mr. Bush’s “surge” policy that sent additional U.S. troops to Iraq to keep the peace and try to foment a civil society in a war-ravaged nation.

“I understand many Iraqis resent America’s presence in their country,” said McCain. “But a lot of Iraqis remember what it was like when Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq.”

If elected president, McCain vows to “continue this successful strategy” of using the U.S. troop surge to help calm Iraqi society and train Iraqis to defend themselves from Islamic militants.

He labels as “surrender” the calls by Democratic candidates for establishing a timetable for a pullout of U.S. troops. “Set a date for withdrawal and we could blow this whole thing,” he asserts.

McCain is at his most passionate when hammering government spending and the ills of big government. But he is careful to voice support for taking care of military veterans and expanding the Veterans Affairs medical centers. “I will never let the veterans down.”

In 2000, when he thrashed then-Texas Gov. George W. Bush in the New Hampshire primary only to lose to him in a nasty South Carolina contest, McCain campaigned as a deficit hawk and fired salvos at the religious right televangelists, famously calling them “agents of intolerance.”

This time around, McCain has courted religious conservatives and adopted at least tacit support for supply-side economic policies.

“I don’t think raising taxes is anything we can do to the American economy right now,” said McCain. “Economic growth is the key to reducing these deficits.”

Another difference in 2008 is that McCain is now seen as a member of his party’s establishment, not the rabble-rousing maverick. In New Hampshire, polls show him with greater support among Republicans than the independents who so famously fueled his 19-percentage-point victory margin over Mr. Bush in 2000.

The GOP’s anti-establishment candidate of 2008 is Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor and Southern Baptist preacher who parlayed support among religious conservatives to a first-place finish in last week’s Iowa caucuses.

Huckabee’s hurdle in New Hampshire is that in live-and-let-live New England, there are few social and religious conservatives. So his campaign is hoping for a third-place finish in the state — behind McCain and Romney — and will fight in South Carolina later this month.

While most of yesterday’s crowd for McCain were over 40, there was a smattering of younger people, including 14 high school students from Providence Country Day school who are learning about electoral politics under the tutelage of Steven Robinson, a history teacher at PCD.

Both Huckabee and McCain hope that a defeat for Romney tomorrow would put a serious dent in the former Massachusetts governor’s quest. Romney, once the prohibitive front-runner here, is well-known because the Boston media market spills into southern New Hampshire and he owns a summer home on Lake Winnipesaukee.

One of Romney’s more prominent supporters over the weekend was Rhode Island’s Governor Carcieri, who appeared at Romney events Saturday and told a reporter he supported Romney because of his leadership style and record as Massachusetts governor.

Carcieri said he always admired Romney’s business and leadership skills and got to know a compassionate side of him after the 2003 Station fire, when Romney attended sessions with grieving families from Massachusetts who lost relatives in the West Warwick nightclub blaze.

“I saw a whole other aspect of him in terms of the compassion and outreach for the families as well as obviously the businessperson, the capability as a leader,” Carcieri said.

“I’ve always admired that Massachusetts was number one in education,” he said — a reference to the state’s public school students’ achievement, which is better than Rhode Island’s. “That’s a message he’s talking about, it’s extremely important to us as a nation. I’m going to try to model that action in some of the things we’re doing.”

McCain supporters, meanwhile, declare the old magic is back. “Look at this crowd, look at the excitement,” said Rhode Island House Minority Leader Robert Watson, R-East Greenwich, a longtime McCain ally who was at the Salem event.

“This is a huge change from when I was up here with him in September,” said Watson. “The settings were, how should I put it, a bit more intimate.”

With that, the crowd started the official 2008 McCain cheer: “Mac is Back, Mac is Back, Mac is Back ...”

That McCain is back in the running is remarkable. At the start of this presidential cycle, he sought to establish himself as the front-runner, raising millions in campaign cash and hiring the cream of GOP political consultants. Then poor fund-raising and a fierce backlash among the anti-immigration wing of his party over a reform plan he helped push in Congress nearly doomed the campaign.

“If he pulls this out Tuesday, all that other stuff will be forgotten,” said Watson.

smackay@projo.com