Jackson, N.H. ? There is snow on the roof of the red covered bridge, the whoosh of cross-country skiers in the fields, a bustle in the village despite temperatures in single digits. The other night the moon glistened, and so did the ice below. This seems a world apart.

Nearly a half-century ago, the election chronicler Theodore H. White came to New Hampshire and found that “this bit of green and forested country is a byway, a beautiful anachronism sheltered from the present by an exemption of history.”

That exemption is gone now, repealed by the technological revolution that brings the outside world into every chilly hand that clasps a mobile device.

North Country towns that in my father’s day were eight hours from Boston can be reached now in two hours 20 minutes. Isolated crossroads where, within my own memory, farmers wrestled with rabbit-ear antennae on their televisions that have long been connected by cable.

Even so, New Hampshire is a place apart. So, too, is North Dakota, but the difference is that every four years since 1912, New Hampshire has offered itself up as a political testing ground, its first-in-the-nation primary status now firmly established.

Long road to Washington

And in the primary’s centennial run, the distance from New Hampshire to Washington — measured in days and the steps of horses in the 19th century, but now by only 109 minutes on an E170 aircraft — seems as far as ever.

That’s because the Republicans in Washington are seeking to maneuver against President Barack Obama rather than to run against him. These are different tasks, calling for different kinds of politics — and, as the list of likely GOP candidates shows, different kinds of men and women.

The campaign is taking shape against the backdrop of unusual change in the Washington political landscape.

For instance, Mr. Obama is mounting a pro-business offensive — his appointment of General Electric’s Jeffrey R. Immelt as his chief economic adviser and his remarks in last week’s State of the Union message are the latest examples — that may transform the political calculus almost as fundamentally as last autumn’s midterm congressional elections.

It is not unusual for business leaders to complain about Democratic presidents, but their complaints about Mr. Obama had special credibility because the president, known for tossing a brick or two at Wall Street and the banks, has had unusually little exposure to them.

John F. Kennedy chose C. Douglas Dillon, a Wall Street banker and Republican with close ties to the Rockefellers, as his treasury secretary and Lyndon B. Johnson retained him for 16 months. Robert S. McNamara, a Harvard Business School graduate and teacher who was president of Ford Motor Co., served as defense secretary under both Kennedy and Johnson. Luther H. Hodges, the commerce secretary in that period, was a pro-business governor of North Carolina responsible for the development of the state’s Research Triangle.

Jimmy Carter’s first treasury secretary was W. Michael Blumenthal, who had a business degree and a Ph.D. in economics and had been president of Bendix International. Bill Clinton was so surrounded by business executives and veterans of the bond markets — in some ways, Robert E. Rubin, a onetime co-chairman of Goldman Sachs, was his most influential adviser — that he was criticized by traditional Democratic interests.

But Mr. Obama had no such coterie — until recently. Now he has bulked up on business types and instituted policy changes that could not have been imagined by some of the activists who supported his candidacy.

Shades of Reagan

Then this month came his extraordinary initiative on regulation, with Mr. Obama vowing to sweep away Washington interference in a way that might make you think Ronald Reagan were in charge. In some ways, the Reagan ethos is.

The president, who announced his offensive in a Wall Street Journal column, now is warring against regulations “that stifle job creation and make our economy less competitive.” This so shocked the body politic that the editorial page of the Journal, the trustee of the Reagan flame, wrote:

“Liberals have spent years dismissing warnings that their agenda created uncertainty and harmed the economy, and then they wake up to find their leader on the Wall Street Journal editorial page disowning ‘unreasonable burdens on business.'”

Now I think it is possible to say that you have seen everything.

And now it is clear why, in the NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll, some 45 percent of the public characterized the president in mid-January as very or somewhat liberal — 10 percentage points below the 55 percent who described him that way a year ago. This came at basically the same time when, according to the latest ABC News/Washington Post Poll, 78 percent of the public approved of the president’s response to the Arizona shooting incident.

The job for the Republicans far from Washington but itching for the keys to the White House is to campaign against a president in the odd position of having obstacles in the capital that are greater than ever, but prospects in the nation that are more promising than they have been in months.

This conundrum is summarized crisply by Thomas D. Rath, a former Republican New Hampshire attorney general.

“Do four or five good weeks erase two years of rudderless policy?” asks Mr. Rath, a prominent figure in the 2008 campaign of Mitt Romney who likely will help the former Massachusetts governor if he mounts a second campaign. “The president is a very popular guy with a lot of personal qualities people identify with. But the American people will have to make a judgment about whether they want him to be president after 2012.”

Running against Obama

The challenge Republicans face here in New Hampshire — where this month the GOP elected a new state chairman with strong tea party links — is how to run against a newly resurgent Mr. Obama, whom they know has peerless campaign skills, an appealing personality and an unusual ability to become a repository for voters’ unspoken impulses and desires.

What they didn’t know was how deftly and swiftly Mr. Obama, after stumbling in the White House and suffering a devastating midterm defeat, could jump on the comeback trail just as they were starting out on the campaign trail.