TV blitz dents cosy image of New Hampshire cosy image

RUPERT CORNWELL

Concord, New Hampshire

A piece of America's most cherished presidential lore may be crumbling: that New Hampshire and its "first-in-the-nation" primary is the one place where money cannot buy electoral success, where an intimate brand of "retail politics" can make or break the mightiest of White House candidacies.

For decades, every fourth winter in an otherwise small and unremarkable New England state has been a ritual part of American history. In New Hampshire Eugene McCarthy drove Lyndon Johnson from the White House, Democratic front-runner Ed Muskie self-destructed in 1972, Gary Hart made his name in 1984 and Bob Dole crashed in 1988. The last time around a Republican insurgent called Pat Buchanan caused what would be fatal trouble for an incumbent George Bush. And outwardly at least, 1996 is the same.

Candidates still work the queues at shopping malls, burst into the sitting- rooms of ordinary voters and battle though blizzards to attend obscure local party dinners - all in pursuit of the state's 200,000-odd Republican voters.

But the tradition is under threat from two changes - one unmissable to even the most fleeting visitor, the other more insidious. With a television and radio advertising campaign from which there is no escape, the publisher Steve Forbes is out to prove that in New Hampshire as everywhere else, money is king. And no longer does the state have a virtual monopoly of the early primary season.

Unfettered by spending limits imposed on his rivals, who rely on outside contributions, Mr Forbes has poured $12m (pounds 8m) to $15m of a personal fortune estimated at $450m into his quest for the nomination, most of it on television in the early primary states.

And this is no bland promotion. The Forbes media effort consists of a relentless onslaught of negative advertisements targeted at Mr Dole and his alleged U-turns on tax policy. Of his opponents, only Lamar Alexander comes close to Mr Forbes in television spending in New Hampshire, with $550,000.

Mr Forbes has acquired 17 per cent of the New Hampshire vote, according to polls, behind Mr Dole with 37 per cent, but clear of Mr Buchanan, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and Mr Alexander. The only poll which matters, of course, is on 20 February. But if Mr Forbes can get out the vote with advertising alone, he will have driven a stake not through the heart of the federal tax code, as he promises, but through the mystique of the New Hampshire primary.

Not least of the factors keeping that mystique alive is the press, delighting in a cosy primary just a short hop from the big media centres of Washington and New York. But, jealous of the attention, other states are beginning to chip away at the traditional role of New Hampshire and Iowa as gatekeepers of the presidential race.

The first major caucuses of the season will be not in Iowa on 12 February, but in Louisiana six days before. After wrangling that almost finished in the courts, New Hampshire will still hold the kick-off primary - but no longer a week before the rest, as state law dictates. Delaware votes just four days later; Arizona, worth 39 convention delegates to New Hampshire's 16, holds its primary on 27 February. Small wonder that some candidates are spending almost as much time in the crucial South and West as in a deeply Republican corner of New England which, once its primary is over, matters not a whit in the subsequent presidential contest.

Such is the endangered myth of New Hampshire. After Bill Clinton came second there in 1992, the shibboleth that a candidate could not be elected president without winning this primary was destroyed. Now the possibility emerges that he could win the White House without even campaigning there.