MANCHESTER, N.H. – Amid the bare walls in the newly opened offices of the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign, Jim Tobin sizes up the operation.

It’s his first visit to the campaign’s otherwise cluttered downtown offices, and Tobin, a Bangor resident and chairman of Bush’s New England campaign, casually asks for an update.

“Giuliani was fire-hazard packed,” volunteers one campaign worker, referring to an exceptionally crowded rally featuring former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, one of several Bush surrogates who have visited the state in the past week.

While those visits – including a Tuesday stop by Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney – gained some attention, they have paled in comparison to the hordes of national media trailing Democratic candidates as they crisscrossed New Hampshire this week in the nation’s first primary contest.

For the 43-year-old Tobin, a veteran strategist in GOP circles, the goal this early in the campaign is to remind voters that the president, although uncontested in the primary, is also a candidate.

And, for now at least, Tobin said the polls and punditry that dominate the intense coverage of the Democratic race have little impact on his strategy.

“We don’t go from one week to another careening out of control based on which Democrat wins the latest primary,” Tobin said as Romney prepared to address a Republican women’s luncheon Tuesday in Portsmouth. “We want to show people that the president has a strong presence here.”

With the Democrats long gone on Thursday, Bush himself stopped in New Hampshire, holding a town-hall style meeting for about 700 Fidelity Investments employees in Merrimack.

But on Tuesday – at the height of the Democratic occupation here – it was Romney representing the president, who even his aides say is likely to face a tough re-election in 2004.

“I’m so confused by what I’m hearing from the Democrat candidates that I don’t know what they stand for now,” Romney said, specifically targeting front-runner John Kerry, the junior senator from Romney’s home state. “We are fortunate to have such steadiness such clarity of vision, such singular purpose in … George Bush.”

New England, however, has not been particularly fertile territory for the president, who lost the region by about 1 million votes in 2000, winning only in New Hampshire.

But Tobin, who has served as an aide for U.S. Sen. William Cohen both in Maine and Washington, D.C., knows the Northeast. He said he saw room for victories in several New England states, five of which – Maine being the exception – have Republican governors.

But Gwethalyn Phillips, the Democratic national chairwoman for Maine, said her party’s nominee – whoever that may be – would have no trouble rallying support among those hungry to oust Bush.

“I have traveled throughout New England and I have never seen Democrats so united,” she said.

While Kerry is the current favorite for the nomination – even besting Bush in some head-to-head polls, the dynamic is likely to change in the South, where candidates such as North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and retired Gen. Wesley Clark of Arkansas could gain momentum.

Although dismissing some pundits’ suggestions that Edwards – a charismatic Southern lawyer with working-class roots – is the candidate Bush most fears, Tobin said Edwards’ second-place finish in Iowa did get his attention.

“It made me take another look at him,” said Tobin, who ran the 1996 national campaign of millionaire businessman Steve Forbes, who also finished second in Iowa with 31 percent of the vote. “I know the work it takes to do that.”

The work is much of the allure in politics for Tobin, a Republican National Committee regional chairman for many years before forming his own consulting company a few years ago.

“The fact that anyone can get involved … in choosing the next president, it matters. I just think the whole thing’s cool,” Tobin said as Romney began to make his way to the podium. “But my wife would say, ‘OK, that’s weird, Jim. Get a life.'”