The 1996 New Hampshire primary - 2 February 1996

I look out my window to a blue Arctic sky above, a lake, frozen a brilliant white. It's not a lake but New York's Central Park reservoir. It's edged by a forest of trees, as bare of foliage as a stack of whisk brooms. I turn indoors and am looking, on the tube, at a similar scene. An icy lake, fringed with a forest of bare trees, the camera pans to a man moving a random crowd of men, women, children, bundled up to the ears with parkas, muffs, woollen caps. The people are all smiling at the man and as he walks briskly past them, they reach out to him and he extends to them his left hand, while his right hand is clenched and held close to his body, a reminder of the Italian campaign in the Second War, during which, just before its end, this man was almost blown apart.

He survived with a paralysed right arm. He's medium height, clean shaven, a straight tip-tilted nose, well-balanced features, mischievous brown eyes. Note the word mischievous. He's well aware of that expression as a personal characteristic and for the past year or more, ever since he decided to run for the presidency, he's been watching out for it. It could be his nemesis, his Achilles' heel.

We're looking at Senator Robert Dole, campaigning as he and the other hopefuls have been doing for ever in New Hampshire. He's rather scholarly looking, not a type you'd tend to associate with the Kansas prairie and the rock-ribbed Republican middle western farmers. He's 72 years old and at another time, indeed any time before Ronald Reagan, age would have been his biggest liability, he most likely would never have dreamed of running.

But up there in New Hampshire, what 16 years ago, Ronald Reagan killed for ever the bogeyman of age. When he was traipsing through the New England snows, Reagan in the first week of that February had just gone into his 70th year. Nobody that old had ever run for president. Eisenhower was just that age when he left the White House after two terms. Why didn't people in the 1980 campaign bring up Reagan's age against him? Because he was smart enough to bring it up first.

On his 69th birthday he was up in New Hampshire, the first primary which by the way is coming up on the 20th of February, and it was governor then. Governor Reagan's idea to throw himself a little birthday party and let television publicise it far and wide. He and his aides contrived several little set speeches and he'd use one or other of them at every crossroads, general store, petrol station, schoolhouse he stopped at. All the little speeches were humorous, self-mocking. Give me this one chance to be president, he'd sigh, I may not be here next time. He would quote Thomas Jefferson or Lincoln and assure the little crowds that he could vouch personally for the quotations. I was there at the time. His chief opponent, one George Bush, believed that he had a comfortable lead in the New Hampshire polls but Reagan took 51 percent of the vote to Bush's 22 and the old man who quipped about his happy evenings with Jefferson was on his way to the White House.

I've noticed at the end of many campaigns that just such small human events as this, Reagan's kidding his own age, robs the opposition of a useful weapon and can, more than all the statistics and parade of issues, political, social, economic, can mark a decisive turn in a man's chances.

I still believe, 20 years before Reagan, that Richard Nixon's fate was sealed in his first go at the presidency when he appeared with Kennedy at the first television debate. It was the first between them, it was the first in history and it came out afterwards that Mr Nixon had refused to use make-up, and everybody remarked on what was then known as a five o'clock shadow and now might be called designer stubble. Anyway for months after that debate, most people had forgotten what was the bone of contention in the debate, what stuck in the memory was Nixon, dour and apparently unshaven up against this young, handsome man with a face as smooth as a choirboy's and getting off a surprising amount of information.

You may have wondered before now, why the men who want to be president make up their minds to run before the New Hampshire primary. Why indeed that primary is so vital to anyone's chances to stay in the race. Consider New Hampshire as a barometer of national political opinion, feeling. It's a tiny New England state of mountains and small winding valleys and an Atlantic coastline. Its first so-called industry in the books is tourism, followed at a distance by agriculture, trade and electrical products. It has just over one million people which makes it 41st of the 50 states. Nighty eight per cent whites, one Hispanic in every hundred, six blacks in every thousand. Offhand it would be hard to think of a state less socially typical of anywhere except New Hampshire and as for population and racial mixture, Vermont, Wyoming maybe.

But how about New Hampshire's vote in the electoral college, which is based on the number of congressmen and women a state is allowed and that's based on population. Well New Hampshire comes out almost a cipher. It has two congressmen against New York's 31, Texas's 30, California's 52. About half the registered voters vote in the national election, in the primary maybe a quarter. So what you have here is about 70 thousand people calling the turn of a national election that will involve say 65 million votes.

Well the answer is brief and maybe sounds stupid. New Hampshire counts because it's the first of the primaries, the trial runs and in the public's opinion, it counts because it always has counted. This is what drives everyone with a presidential ambition to declare himself by the previous Christmas at the latest, and in the worst of the winter, go up there and day after day, slog through the snows and as Lyndon Johnson put it, press the flesh. Pressing the flesh has always been a vital performance in any democratic country. Do you remember Winston Churchill's melancholy comment on a Tory statesman who hated to shake hands, yet who lusted long and unsuccessfully to become prime minister: "Alas, he never conquered but then he never stooped."

But also apart from the ridiculous popular belief that New Hampshire is a crucial test of national opinion, there are two figures, statistics, that come looming up in the winter once every four years to haunt all the runners. One is that in the presidential election itself, in November, New Hampshire has, without a twist or hesitating turn, always voted for the man who came to be president. In other words, the instinct of this tiny state, by what baffling magic, has been correct, in 16 successive presidential elections over 64 years.

The other figure, which is even more telling for the candidates, is that while a win in the New Hampshire primary does not necessarily mean a win throughout the country in November, to lose a New Hampshire primary is always, I think, practically always, the perfect way to lose your party's nomination.

In 1988, Senator Dole was in the thick of primary campaigning in New Hampshire and looked to many people as if he'd win there. His main opponent was George Bush. By now everybody I believe has forgotten the political issues they fought on, what everybody remembers was one short sentence of Senator Dole's. Asked by a reporter on the eve of the balloting, what did he think should be a priority for Mr Bush, his opponent, the senator said: "Stop telling lies about me and my record." To the good-natured crowds who listened, to everybody along the snowbound way, this was like a jab in the eye.

Afterwards the campaign aide to Senator Dole said, right there, you lost the primary. And ever since 1988 ordinary voters who haven't bothered to learn much about Senator Dole, they say almost by rote, but you know, he has a mean streak. Well maybe he has, I can't think of another remark as bitter as the one he made about Bush. But what he does have and is watchful, even wary about, is a witty streak. So that's a liability? You bet. The fact that in a democracy, most people confuse wit with sarcasm and think ill of it had never crossed my mind until, on a weekend in Pennsylvania on the retired President Eisenhower's farm, the great man confided in a memorable moment, that there was one man in public life he couldn't stand. I could have confidently guessed at a hundred names and got it wrong. To my astonishment he said: Adlai Stevenson, the Democrats' candidate against him in 1952 and 56. Stevenson, the genial, courteous, lovable, roly-poly man who too had a gift of wit and it was for his wit that Eisenhower disliked, you might almost say distrusted him. "In a word," said the General "he was a smart guy." Amazing.

Then I think back to a Senate hearing at which Senator Dole's bewitching wife was to be confirmed or rejected as a cabinet officer, Secretary of Transportation. A Democratic senator on the committee turned to Senator Dole and said: "Senator, don't you recognise here a conflict of interest?" At once Dole replied, "No conflict, much interest." Too quick, too good, he was warned. So one of the saddest sights in New Hampshire in the next two weekends will be Senator Dole facing a question from some dumb reporter, suddenly twinkling with a spontaneous droll response but swallowing hard and buttoning his lip. Watch it, senator, rather be president than witty.

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