The Political Interest

By Michael Kramer

NASHUA, N.H. As the news of John Sununu's fall blared from the television set last Tuesday, a smile of sweet revenge crossed Hugh Gregg's face, and his hand, which had turned purple from strangling a golf putter in anticipation of the announcement, finally relaxed. "A great day," said Gregg, who has guided George Bush through the bruising world of New Hampshire Republican politics since 1979, when the two men first toured the state in Gregg's Pontiac station wagon. "This will really help the President here."

For the G.O.P., which has controlled the Granite State's politics since the beginning of time, intraparty warfare is a favorite spectator sport and the Gregg-Sununu feud is its Super Bowl. Gregg, 74, was Governor in the mid-1950s, and has been New Hampshire's leading moderate Republican ever since. Sununu's election as Governor in 1982 was a triumph for the party's conservative wing. Gregg's son Judd, 44, is the current Governor. Judd succeeded Sununu and is more conservative than his father, but the old rivalry endures. Thus the simple matter of how to respond to Sununu's departure became a minicrisis. With Judd away, the stance-crafting chore fell to Hugh, who is his son's closest political confidant. Judd's staff wanted to say nothing at all. Hugh urged a mild statement of praise. "You don't kick a man when he's down," Hugh told one of his son's aides, chuckling to signal that he really would like to do nothing better. "Actually," says Hugh, "we saw the end coming when the President called Judd two weeks ago to say he wanted us, rather than Sununu, to run the '92 re-election drive here. Now a lot of Republicans who've been sitting back because they can't stand Sununu will come out of the woodwork, and we'll finally get this show on the road."

Not a moment too soon. The expected primary challenge to Bush from conservative commentator Pat Buchanan is no trifling matter in New Hampshire. The state's first-in-the-nation primary has always been an outsized test of political strength, and Bush has always had difficulties here. Buchanan could easily capture 30% of the G.O.P. primary vote; anything higher will be interpreted as a setback for Bush even if, technically, he wins. A Buchanan victory could roil everything. Since 1952 -- when Harry Truman decided to retire after losing to Estes Kefauver -- no one has been elected President without first winning his party's New Hampshire primary.

Buchanan's most significant support comes from the state's largest newspaper, the Manchester Union Leader, whose hostility toward Bush is legend. The paper's late publisher, William Loeb, years ago labeled Bush a "clean- fingernail, silk-stocking liberal," and no amount of presidential stroking has calmed Loeb's successor, his widow Nackey, 67. To her, Bush simply "sits under an umbrella and watches the storm, hoping to come out with neither rain on his face nor clay on his feet."

Loeb's assessment goes to the core of Bush's political problem, and Hugh Gregg, respected across ideological lines as a straight shooter, frankly agrees with some of the Union Leader's criticism. "We're hurting real bad," says Gregg, "and I don't think the President has any concept of what's going on up here."

Only three years ago, New Hampshire enjoyed phenomenal prosperity. Today the question is not when things will get better, but how much worse they will become. In the wake of defense-industry cutbacks, a real estate bust and bank failures, the state's unemployment rate has risen from 2.4% when Bush was elected to 6.9%, the highest September rate ever. In the past two years 10% of New Hampshire's jobs have just disappeared. The rates of increase in the number of people on food stamps and welfare are the nation's highest. Housing experts say a home bought in the past five years won't command its purchase price at resale until the end of the century.

"We're not unsophisticated," says Gregg. "We overbuilt and overcommitted, and it's mostly our own fault. But it's rational for people to feel that the President isn't doing enough to help. We can't wait for the January State of the Union address to learn what the Administration's new economic-stimulus plan is; and I can't understand why we have to."

Gregg predicts that Buchanan will get "a healthy protest vote" and that "others will show their upset by staying home on Election Day." But he is nonetheless confident that Bush will prevail because "there's no serious alternative." If there were, says Edward Dupont, the Republican state-senate president, "we might well have a different story."

Dupont and other Republicans identify the President's waffling on the issue of extending unemployment compensation benefits as particularly harmful to Bush. "The folks being laid off now are highly skilled, hard-working taxpayers caught in a depression," says Dupont, who has been forced to lay off four employees from his heating-fuel business in order to carry customers who cannot pay their bills. "When they look to the government for help and hear the President say things aren't so bad, their fear becomes anger."

Hugh Gregg's first priority is to get Bush "up here as often as possible to show that he cares. But what do we do with him? We can't walk him through an operating plant because most of them are down. And how can we have an incumbent President seek votes on unemployment lines?"

Many New Hampshire Republicans believe that Bush owes them his presidency. Bush's come-from-behind victory over Senator Robert Dole in the 1988 primary (due largely to a Sununu-directed distortion of Dole's record) revived the President's faltering campaign. "Thank you, New Hampshire," said Bush after he won the presidency. "I'll never forget." As a result, says Senator Dupont, "a lot of New Hampshire Republicans got big jobs in Washington, with Sununu at the top of the list. But what has it done for us?" The answer -- a single word heard from many New Hampshire Republicans these days -- is "abandonment."