Hampshire Primary

IN NEW Hampshire, the candidacy of presidential hopeful Bill Bradley in 1999 is looking more like the candidacy of Paul Tsongas in 1991 -- with a few key exceptions.Vice President Al Gore, the acknowledged front-runner for the Democratic nomination, would be wise to familiarize himself with the surprise victory Tsongas pulled off in the New Hampshire primary in 1992. If Mr. Gore did, he might take Mr. Bradley a little more seriously.The little-known advantage that Tsongas, the former U.S. senator from Massachusetts who died in 1997, had eight years ago is basically the same advantage Mr. Bradley will have in the 2000 primary: He's considered a long-shot (a special appeal to voters seeking a fiscally conservative liberal)

ALTON, N.H. -- On a cold, drizzly morning this week, Bill Davies woke up itching for a candidate fix. So he jumped out of bed to get to a 7: 45 a.m. town hall meeting where Sen. John McCain was speaking.Then he followed the Republican presidential hopeful in the rain to American Legion Post 72 here. By lunch, he had gripped McCain's hand and had looked him in the eye. Twice."He showed me the man behind the politician," Davies said. "That's important."Only in New Hampshire is a candidate's personal touch considered a voter's birthright.

CONCORD, N.H. -- The 48 bits of cardboard read like a Who's Who of American presidential politics: John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, Colossus G. Benson.Yes, Colossus G. Benson. And Billy Joe Clegg, Georgiana Doerschuck and Arthur O. Blessitt, all people -- or at least primates -- with one-time presidential ambitions and now stars of New Hampshire Presidential Primary Trading Cards.First printed last year as a civics lesson for the state's fourth-graders, the trading cards have become keepsakes for political junkie types who mainline C-SPAN and know Edmund S. Muskie's middle name (it's Sixtus)

WASHINGTON -- Former Vice President Dan Quayle, acknowledging that "reality set in" about his dim chances for the Republican presidential nomination, dropped out of the race yesterday, citing the huge financial advantage held by Texas Gov. George W. Bush and the bunched-up calendar of primaries and caucuses in early 2000.At a news conference in Phoenix, Quayle said he had enough resources to compete in the two earliest major tests -- the precinct caucuses in Iowa and the New Hampshire primary -- and thought he had a good chance of winning the latter, "but you need more than that."

WASHINGTON -- On the Saturday morning after the New Hampshire primary of 1984, all the major newspapers in Maine carried the same picture on the front page. It showed former Vice President Walter F. Mondale posing on the front steps of the statehouse in Augusta with Gov. Joseph Brennan and almost all of the Democrats in the state legislature.Mr. Mondale had just lost the New Hampshire primary to Gary Hart in an upset and he needed to win the Maine caucuses to help him remain viable. The picture looked like one of those old photos of the Politburo lining up at the Kremlin, but there was no mistaking the message that party leaders were endorsing Mr. Mondale.

''Well, in our country,'' said Alice, still panting a little, ''you'd generally get to somewhere else -- if you ran very fast for a long time as we've been doing.''''A slow sort of country!'' said the Queen. ''Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.''''Through the Looking-Glass'' ARE YOU SAD OR GLAD that this year's presidential campaign finally is over?Are you a political junkie who couldn't get enough of the candidates' machinations and the pundits' analyses of them; or were you rendered catatonic by it all?

BEDFORD, N.H. -- Three questions hold the key to tomorrow's New Hampshire primary .Can Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole hang on to enough Republicans to achieve the 28 to 30 percent of the vote needed to succeed? Polls show him with a hard core of 20 to 22 percent of the vote among party activists but little evidence of enthusiasm among less involved Republicans. In short, he still has some persuading to do.Second, is Patrick J. Buchanan a threat to win here or just the flavor of the week?

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- A month ago, only two reporters showed up when Steve Forbes spoke to a Rotary Club luncheon in Portsmouth.This week, Mr. Forbes arrived for a 7:30 a.m. speech at a Rotary Club here and was met by six television crews and more than two dozen reporters from state and national news organizations.The message in this contrast is that Steve Forbes has suddenly become a hot political property, with the New Hampshire primary just a month away.Nor is his new celebrity reflected only in press attention.

CONCORD, N.H. -- In 1964, the Republican presidential primary here was supposed to be a contest between conservative Barry M. Goldwater and liberal Nelson A. Rockefeller.But a month before the vote, two young men, Paul Grindle and David Goldberg, opened an office across from the state Capitol and began a campaign to draft Henry Cabot Lodge, then ambassador to South Vietnam. While the two "serious" candidates built campaign organizations, the two amateurs sent postcards to every Republican household in the state, on which they could pledge support for Mr. Lodge and mail it in.It seemed like a pointless exercise until Mr. Grindle and Mr. Goldberg invited skeptical reporters to open the mail with them.

BEDFORD, N.H. -- The New Hampshire primary is supposed to be a defining event in American politics. But this time the results have only compounded and exacerbated the problems of the Republican Party.Rather than narrowing the field of prospective presidential nominees to one or two, as has been the case in every previous Republican primary here, the voters have rejected the candidate of the party establishment, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, in favor of a candidate, Patrick J. Buchanan, whom 57 percent of the voters found unacceptably extremist based on exit polls last night.

HANOVER, N.H. -- "The Comeback Kid is always uppermost in my mind," Sen. John McCain said the other day, with a gleam in his eye. "I look forward to that name." Tonight, he just might get it. "We're going to win," the Arizona Republican told a couple of hundred voters yesterday on the snow-covered town square in Keene, N.H., "because [voters] have seen me. They've seen me at 101 town hall meetings. They've seen me, and they've been able to ask the questions." Left for dead beside the presidential campaign highway last spring, McCain has pulled himself back into contention.

CONCORD, N.H. -- The traffic-clogging lines that curl into Barack Obama's rallies contain a diverse group, from mothers toting young children to bearded professionals in sturdy all-weather boots. But perhaps most desirable are voters like Lynn Xie, who waited in a quarter-mile-long line last week to hear the Illinois senator speak. "It's really exciting for me," said the Dartmouth College student, boning up for her first presidential election. "I just turned 19." Obama turned the Democratic contest on its ear last week with a decisive victory in the Iowa caucuses, generated in large part by overwhelming support from voters younger than 30. Nearly six in 10 in that age bracket supported Obama - more than five times the number that voted for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

The stakes in the U.S. presidential election may be the highest in decades, with danger spots multiplying around the world and economic threats looming at home. The election process - the first in 56 years that doesn't involve an incumbent president or vice president - has moved into high gear after Barack Obama's upset of national front runner Hillary Clinton in the Iowa Democratic caucuses and a similar defeat in Iowa of Republican leader Mitt Romney by Mike Huckabee, a former governor of Arkansas.

CHICAGO -- Upending decades of tradition, Democrats are expected to approve today a presidential nominating calendar that will add further importance to states that vote early and will make January 2008 an extremely busy month for politics. Members of the Democratic National Committee are poised to insert the Nevada caucuses between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the traditional starting points on the road to the White House. South Carolina's primary is expected to follow closely behind.

The Democratic Party intends to add Nevada and South Carolina to the opening chapter of the 2008 presidential campaign, with a key panel deciding yesterday to introduce the voice of Western and Southern voters to the Iowa-New Hampshire duet. At a meeting yesterday in Washington, the rules and bylaws committee of the Democratic National Committee voted to place Nevada between the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary, the two contests that traditionally have launched the race. The group voted to add a South Carolina primary soon after New Hampshire's.

A commission of Democrats has worked up the nerve to propose that voters in one or two other states make known their presidential preferences before New Hampshire holds its zealously guarded first-in-the-nation primary. The horrified reaction in the Granite State might suggest real reform is afoot in the dysfunctional primary process. But no. The likely result -- doubtless after a knock-down, drag-out battle next spring in the Democratic Central Committee -- would be a subtle change at best.

Former U.S. Sen. Eugene J. McCarthy, whose surprisingly strong showing in the 1968 New Hampshire Democratic presidential primary dramatized deepening public opposition to the Vietnam War and effectively ended President Lyndon B. Johnson's political career, died yesterday. He was 89. Mr. McCarthy, a Democrat who represented Minnesota, died at a retirement home in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., where he had lived for several years. A relatively obscure senator who turned sour on the war as the United States escalated its troop buildup in the mid-1960s, Mr. McCarthy entered the New Hampshire primary partly to fill a vacuum: More prominent anti-war politicians, assuming that Mr. Johnson was unbeatable, had decided not to run against him. Mr. McCarthy's candidacy was initially dismissed as hopelessly quixotic.

WASHINGTON - Eager to amass a voter army for the fall, Sen. John Kerry's presidential campaign will embark this week on an ambitious plan to mobilize voters through a series of national house parties similar to those popularized by former rival Howard Dean. The first wave of house parties is scheduled to take place next Saturday, with Kerry addressing the gatherings in a 6 p.m. conference call, according to the candidate's Web site. "We want to take advantage of the energy out there and get people invested," said Jeanne Shaheen, a former governor of New Hampshire and Kerry's national chairwoman.

Howard Dean's campaign in Maryland is the best organized among all the Democratic presidential candidates, and he's won the backing of some of the state's leading politicians. Now, the question is whether the former Vermont governor will even have a chance to put those advantages to use by the time Maryland's primary rolls around March 2. After Sen. John Kerry's win yesterday in the New Hampshire primary - eight days after his triumph in the Iowa caucuses - Maryland Democrats said Kerry would be hard to stop as he rides a wave of momentum into the rest of the country.

"President Truman looks upon presidential preference and delegate primaries in the states as a lot of eyewash," The Sun reported Feb. 1, 1952. "He thinks they make very little impression on the delegates who meet in national party conventions and actually do the nominating; he suspects they don't mean a thing. "For these reasons, he sees no sense in having his name entered in the various spring primary contests. Moreover, and more importantly, he figures that if he wants renomination this year he can get it without bothering with the `skirmishes' in the states.