Comeback kid?

Look out, here comes John McCain.

Senator John McCain’s once front- running presidential campaign, which has been battered by plunging polls, defecting donors and staff turmoil, is showing signs of a rebound in New Hampshire.

McCain, whose bid for the Republican nomination has been hurt by conservatives’ hostility to his pro-immigration views and independents’ ire over his support for the Iraq war, has refocused his efforts on New Hampshire, site of the nation’s first primary. McCain has risen 10 percentage points since July in one new poll and 5 in another.

“You have McCain, I think, making a comeback with almost no money,” former President Bill Clinton, who knows something about New Hampshire comebacks from his 1992 campaign, said in a Sept. 27 interview. “He deserves to be a major candidate.”

But then he said this.

Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, told CNN Wednesday he agrees with President Bush’s veto of legislation expanding a children’s health insurance program, saying the bill provided a “phony smoke and mirrors way of paying for it.”

“Right call by the president,” the Republican White House hopeful told CNN’s John King. “We’ve laid a debt on these same children ... that we’re saying we're going to give health insurance to.”

And so much for that.