'One of the biggest upsets'

IT LOOKS LIKE Super Duper Tuesday — Feb. 5, when New Jersey and at least 21 other states hold primaries and caucuses — is going to be more super duper than anyone realized.

A stunning primary victory in New Hampshire last night by U.S. Sen.

— written off as dead in the water hours earlier by the political punditocracy — over U.S. Sen.

has turned the 2008 White House race upside down.

Clinton’s win — one of the biggest upsets in modern American political history, given the big lead held by Obama in last-minute polls — obscured an almost as remarkable, yet comfortable, Republican win by U.S. Sen.

, whose campaign was also on the ropes not so long ago.

The McCain and Clinton wins — just five days after upstarts Obama and

were

Did

tears on Monday boost her vote totals yesterday?

Obama’s lead melted overnight after all TV networks showed Clinton’s eyes welling up and her voice breaking as she spoke to voters in a Portsmouth, N.H., restaurant.

Asked by a sympathetic voter how she keeps going in the grueling campaign, she replied, “It’s not easy. It’s not easy.

“And I couldn’t do it if I just didn’t, you know, passionately believe it was the right thing to do,” she said, her voice catching.

“You know, I’ve had so many opportunities from this country, I just don’t want to see us fall backwards,” she said, her voice trailing off.

The voters applauded encouragingly.

A clip showing the emotional moment was among the most viewed on YouTube yesterday.

It may have humanized a woman whose enemies have caricatured as steely, ambitious and dangerous, like the

character in “The Manchurian Candidate.”

It was an unscripted, unbidden moment of real humanity. A rare event in a presidential campaign. And probably a positive one for Clinton.

As

of the

observed, “It wasn’t that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton teared up. It was all the times she didn’t.”

If it wasn’t the tears that bouyed

unexpected win, could the polls simply have been wrong because the racially charged “Bradley Effect” is still hanging around in American politics?

The “Bradley Effect” is the name pundits gave to what was a disturbing pattern in elections in the 1980s: White voters telling pollsters they supported a black candidate, and then voting for the white one in the privacy of the voting booth.

It was named for former Los Angeles Mayor

, who ran for governor of California in 1982 and built a comfortable lead in every poll over his Republican rival,

, only to lose on Election Day.

In New Hampshire, the final round of polls showed

with a solid lead — anywhere from 5 to 13 percentage points — yet Clinton won. If white voters were misleading pollsters about their intentions in 2008, it would surely undercut the media storyline that Americans are transcending race in politics.

Despite the similarities, one pollster said last night he believes other factors — and not the “Bradley Effect” — steered voters toward Clinton.

, the Franklin & Marshall political scientist who runs the Keystone Poll, said he believes that Clinton’s better field operation, a lower youth turnout than in Iowa and a late rush of independents toward

on the Republican side made the difference.

“There is no evidence of that [the Bradley Effect],” insisted Madonna, citing the polls in the 2007 Philadelphia’s mayor’s race with two whites and three blacks, which proved accurate.

Still, given how unexpected the apparent late surge of Clinton has been, there will likely be a lot more talk about why the polls were wrong.

a member of Obama’s national finance team, yesterday praised Clinton and her husband as “extraordinarily formidable and extraordinarily qualifed,” while saying the contest for the nomination was far from over for the two senators.

“Barack Obama, in addition to running a traditional presidential campaign, is leading a movement,” said Alderman said. “The movement sustains itself by moving. This thing won’t be linear. No one expects him to win every contest.”

U.S. Sen.

had a Lazarus-like revival yesterday after his campaign appeared nearly flat-lined last summer as it hemorrhaged cash and jettisoned staffers.

Pennsylvanian

, a McCain supporter who served in

White House Office of Homeland Security, said McCain kept on working through those lean times.

“The interesting thing to me is that when McCain’s campaign appeared virtually dead, McCain was the one person who really didn’t see it,” Holman said. “I think that’s a pretty powerful character trait when looking at a potential president.”

McCain and Romney will rematch in next Tuesday’s Michigan primary, where McCain has run strong in previous years and Romney’s family name carries power because his father was a popular governor there.

,

campaign chairman in Pennsylvania, predicts a close result in Michigan.

“My gut tells me Romney should win,” Kopp said. “Michigan is a state where it’s almost a second home to him.”

A loss to McCain would add up to three second-place finishes in as many weeks. Would that force Romney from the field?

The Associated Press tracked down Barack Obama’s relatives in Kogelo, Kenya, yesterday.

They listened to the news on the radio seated on plastic chairs, surrounded by chickens and barefoot children.

The early results were encouraging, bringing a whoop of satisfaction from the candidate’s uncle,

on Monday.

It took almost an entire day, but one of the great mysteries of the 2008 race has been solved: The identity of two men who held up signs at a

rally Monday in Salem, N.H., that read “Iron My Shirt” and started yelling the phrase at the candidate.

The strange moment played out well for the then-beleaguered Democrat, who watched the two men ejected from the hall and got a big laugh when she said: “Oh, the remnants of sexism, alive and well tonight.”

The bizarro incident played out so well for Clinton, in fact, that some right-wing bloggers smelled a rat.

wrote, “I have a feeling there’s some deception going on.”

But the joke was on them — the seemingly sexist prank was carried out by exactly whom you might suspect: Two second-bananas from a shock-jock radio show in nearby Boston.

told “Access Hollywood’s”

that on the rare

Gov. Rendell has never been one to give a safe answer, and last night — interviewed on national TV with MSNBC’s

and Philly native

— was no exception.

Out of the blue, he seemed to endorse a pol from a neighboring state — Delaware Sen.

— for the Democratic vice presidential nod, assuming that Illinois Sen.

wins the nomination.

“I think that Joe Biden, with his foreign policy and terrorism background, would be perfect,” said