Elaine Madigan--fortyish, two kids, a house on the outskirts of Nashua, N.H.--likes what she hears. She's sitting in her neighbor's living room, drinking coffee at 8 p.m. on a Sunday night and listening to Joan Kennedy talk about the campaign. Tomorrow, Elaine will pack the kids off to school and vote for Ted Kennedy. Kennedy, she says, has "all the leadership qualities that Jimmy Carter lacks." She is worried about heating her home this winter and about her kids being sent off to fight in the Persian Gulf. She is fed up with talk from the White House, tired of the man she labels "Mr. Rosalynn Carter."

Up in Manchester, N.H., in Ted Kennedy's headquarters, the campaign troops are hoping that somewhere out in all those hills, there are enough Elaine Madigans to keep Jimmy Carter from getting 50 per cent of tomorrow's vote. That's the stated goal of Ted Kennedy's New Hampshire campaign coordinator, Dudley Dudley. Three months ago, people would have chuckled in horror at such predictions. But now, like a crippled grizzly with traps on both legs, Ted Kennedy is struggling through the New Hampshire grind. The candidate himself looks tired, a much different man from the one who stood in Faneuil Hall November 7 and promised to bring the Carter administration to its knees.

Well, Senator, a boston TV journalist quipped to Kennedy about two weeks ago, "just about everything that could go wrong with your campaign has gone wrong." Kennedy smiles for the camera and starts to talk about the "uphill battles." Pressed to critique his own campaign since his announcement, Kennedy concedes that there is one thing he surely would not do again: he would not buy another one of those expensive jets to campaign in.

People in the Kennedy organization now talk about nothing but "tough fight" and "uphill battles." They guard against making predictions. They wonder what's going to happen. Three months ago, they were too busy celebrating the long-awaited declaration of candidacy to actually sit down and think. They learned their lesson in Iowa, where Jimmy Carter pledged and phoned and sabre-rattled his way to a victory that drained the blood from Kennedy's face and brought a virtual halt in contributions. Things are different now; the organization is scrambling to get money and get organized. The candidate is trying not to yell. Kennedy now thinks before he answers.

***

Joel Dubowik of Nashua standing in the same room as Elaine Madigan, listening to Joan Kennedy speak. Joel thinks that Ted Kennedy has done some pretty good things in the Senate. He likes the way Kennedy stands on foreign policy and energy issues. He doesn't think that Chappaquiddick can be held against the candidate.

But Joel is a member of the National Rifle Association and he thinks Ted Kennedy wants to take away his guns. "I think he's against guns because of his brother's death and I can't blame him," Joel says. Were it not for the gun issue, he repeats, he thinks he would vote for Kennedy. "He's a helluva nice guy."

The senator himself stamps his feet on the asphalt outside a machine tool plant in Keene. It is cold as hell in western New Hampshire in the middle of February and Kennedy, like the reporters who have been waiting in the snow for 45 minutes, is trying to keep warm. The campaign "event" has been closed to the press; the issue that most of the workers asked him about, Kennedy says, is gun control. The senator is not happy; the National Rifle Association, he says, has put together an "active, serious campaign, distorting and misrepresenting my position on this issue."

Over at the New Hampshire Highway Hotel, Dick Riley, director of the Gun Owners (GO) of New Hampshire, insists that the NRA, the nation's most powerful lobby, is not paying for the bumper stickers that the folds in the crowd are holding. "If Kennedy Wins, YOU LOSE." (Black on Day-glo Orange) "Ted Kennedy Drives Women to Drink." (White on Fire Engine Red) GO of New Hampshire, he tells me, is backing a new group called GO Against Kennedy. The organization ran ads in Shotgun News and GunWeek and used the money it brought in to pay for the stickers. That evening, during a Republican-stocked candidates' forum, Ted Kennedy is everyone's devil incarnate.

Ted Kennedy's strong stands on the strong issues will not win him many votes tomorrow. Kennedy, after all, voted in favor of Medicaid-funded abortions and wrote the bill on the Saturday Night specials. In the process, he earned the enmity of the nation's most powerful single-issue lobbies and now the big lobbies are funneling big money against him in revenge.

Kennedy's 17-year-old progressive Senate record cannot be lightly dismissed; many of his colleagues consider him the single most effective lawmaker on Capitol Hill. But with advantages of pointing to experience come the disadvantages of not being able to slide too far on the issues. In New Hampshire, Dudley says, she doubts whether the "gun control votes"--her label--would fall on Kennedy's side in any case. Other organizers worry more and, like nervous players glancing the clock, wait for tomorrow night's returns and hope for the best.

***

The Kennedy campaign now knows what it's like to fight an incumbent. Time and again, Kennedy taunts, threatens and cajoles, eager to smoke out Carter from his Oval Office perch and watch the president become human again. Aren't you tired of surrogates carrying the president's message? Aren't you tired of radio and television images? Don't you feel insulted? Some organizers say the backlash vote -- the soft Carter support, the people who aren't too high on Kennedy but wanted to see the president in the flesh--may be high. The real test of the campaign, Kennedy predicts, will come when Carter leaves the White House. In the meantime, Kennedy is studying hard.

For his part, Carter has slipped from the roost only once, descending into the political pit to label Kennedy's comments on Iran "damaging to the country." But the Rose Garden strategy, as Carter's miraculous two-month turn about shows, has never worked better. At the mere mention of a word--"hostages"--the network cameras roll, and Carter is there, in your living room, talking tough, talking in prime time, talking about the thing that people are interested in. The rally-round-the-flag quotient, Kennedy Massachusetts organizers say, has fallen from it Iowa high, but no one doubts that it still exists.

The problem with Kennedy's strategy, people whisper in your ear, is that it never existed. We've got a candidate who's two-to-one up in the polls and he's a Kennedy, organizers thought. Who needs a game plan? But as Carter's stay-at-home-and-manage-the-country tactics threatened to bury the senator's campaign, Kennedy's advisers armed their candidate with major policy addresses tailored to sharpen his attacks on the president and draw the media's eye.