MANCHESTER, N.H. — Not so fast.

The spouse of the comeback kid has had a comeback of her own. Hillary Clinton's surprising win in New Hampshire Tuesday, defying the polls and humiliating the pundits and the talking heads, gives new life to her campaign, throwing cold water on the liberal dreamers and youthful independents who would make Barack Obama the new voice in American politics for a new century.

According to almost every poll, Mr. Obama was supposed to be on his way to a solid second victory in New Hampshire. Since no candidate has won both Iowa and New Hampshire and then lost the nomination, last night should have witnessed the coronation of Barack Obama as the Democrat's presidential nominee.

We don't think so, said the conservative suburbanites in the southern precincts of the state, most of whom live in what are now Boston bedroom communities. We may be Democrats, they declared last night, but we're also taxpayers. We work in offices where competence and experience matter, and dreams are often unaffordable luxuries.

They went Clinton, and they reminded us all that America is a big, diverse, but largely suburban and pragmatic country. And that's the America that decides elections.

The Democratic race is now wide open. The next state is Nevada, the first state with a large Latino vote. Ms. Clinton is apparently ahead there. But there are rumours that the powerful Culinary Workers are about to come off the fence and endorse Mr. Obama. Will they now?

Then it will be on to South Carolina, where almost half of registered voters are black, and where Mr. Obama galvanized his campaign last month with a barn-burning speech before a mostly black and wildly enthusiastic crowd of 30,000. Former North Carolina senator John Edwards has hopes to get back into the race there, but his disappointing result last night may have doomed his candidacy.

After South Carolina comes Florida, followed by the 20-plus states that vote Feb. 5 and that will decide this race. Make that “should.” Nothing is certain any more.

Ms. Clinton now faces a fascinating choice. Her carefully modulated and controlled campaign, which served her so well for 50 of the past 52 weeks, underperformed in Iowa, but came through for her in New Hampshire.

To carry the momentum, she could seek a way to regenerate excitement over the first real bid by a woman candidate for the presidency. Exit polls show that nearly half of all women voters in the Democratic primary in New Hampshire voted for Ms. Clinton, while only a third supported Mr. Obama.

Alternatively, she could go on the attack, more forcibly even than she did in the past couple of days, which seemed to have helped her campaign. She could explicitly question Mr. Obama's fitness to govern, his lack of experience and the contradictions of his voting record in the Illinois and Washington senates.

Or she could carry on with her current campaign team and her pragmatic, down-the-middle approach, which has disappointed at times, but which came through for her last night.

And then there was her moment of vulnerability, when she fought tears while talking to voters yesterday about her passionate, personal commitment to this race. That was genuine, and she needs to manufacture more of it.

As for Mr. Obama, he has been reminded that his campaign is, in fact, an insurgency, that thus far it has been borne on the wings of thousands of independent and uncommitted voters, thousands of young voters who until now had shown little interest in the business-as-usual politics of their parents' generations, thousands of minority voters and thousands of disenchanted Republicans.

But his campaign has not yet won over the solid base of the Democratic Party: the union workers, middle- and working-class women, social conservative Democrats – the core of the Democratic Party, which does not appreciate, and has no intention of, being shunted aside.

They are the Democrats Mr. Obama must persuade. He must reassure them that their party is safe with him and that he can win the presidency. And we are all going to see, over the coming days, how Barack Obama deals with disappointment.

The same balmy weather that brought unprecedented numbers of voters, including independents, to the polls favoured Arizona Senator John McCain, throwing former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney into second place once again. Mr. Romney, though, is off to Michigan, where he is heavily favoured to win, and he can take perverse solace in having lost in Iowa to one candidate, Mike Huckabee, and in New Hampshire to Mr. McCain. What a race. What a mess.

A final thing must be said. John McCain was once seen as the heir presumptive of the Republican nomination. Then he was the fatally wounded old guy who couldn't raise any money and had to lay off his staff. Now he's back in the game.

Hillary Clinton's victory was inevitable. Then she was the tired face of the Democratic status quo, and Barack Obama was the new force. Now it's anybody's race.

The only thing more discreditable than the polling data in this race is the assembly of pundits and talking heads who, in both the Democratic and Republican race, are getting it perfectly wrong, day after day after day.

And yet somehow, that feels rather satisfying.