INSIDE THE RACE

By NANCY GIBBS AND MICHAEL DUFFY

ONE OF THE STRANGE, SCARRING THINGS about the New Hampshire primary is its curious way of looking less like the beginning of the presidential race than the end of it. The contest suddenly contracts into an eight-day challenge to the candidates' cleverness and conscience, a fight not only with one another but with themselves. They have to outflank the enemy; but they must also decide how far they are willing to go to win, and that is less an intellectual challenge than a moral one. If they gain the whole world at the cost of their own souls, the battle for New Hampshire will haunt them whether they win or lose.

Those who stoop in New Hampshire often conquer, but the contortions have left the winners aching long after. In 1988 George Bush promised no new taxes, and Bob Dole fatally refused; two years later Bush ripped his party apart when he abandoned his pledge. In 1992 Bill Clinton promised a juicy middle-class tax cut and upon election didn't bother with a decent interval: he jettisoned the idea before taking office. Lately New Hampshire hasn't just picked Presidents; it has presaged presidencies.

It was in this crucible that the four top contenders arrived on Tuesday, appearing in rough order of their showing in the Iowa caucuses the night before: Dole, Buchanan, Alexander and, a day later (though not a dollar shorter), Forbes. As they settled into their base camps at hotels around Manchester, each candidate sat down with his brain trust, looked at the polls and began to figure out the four-way chess match they would have to play for the next seven days.

The problem for Bob Dole, the wounded front runner, was that he was unable to be Pat Buchanan and unwilling to be himself. Lamar Alexander, trying to convince voters he was more than the "least worse" choice, had to roll out a refreshened agenda even if its contents, such as the abolition of food stamps, might come back to haunt him. Steve Forbes had to decide whether to admit he had been running an ugly race, cage his pit bulls and run on his strengths instead of his enemies' weaknesses. And Pat Buchanan, who reinvents Republicanism when he offers dispirited workers a vision of paradise, had to decide how much damage he was willing to do to his party in the effort to become its leader.

By the time Dole arrived, his enemy had a new name. It was no longer Forbes, who had scared the bejeezus out of Dole before Iowa; in fact, Dole campaign manager Scott Reed and Forbes' manager Bill Dal Col suddenly found common cause again, since according to tracking polls many of those who supported Forbes were turning to Alexander. The Dole team quarreled about whom to target. Some said it should be Buchanan, who draws much of his support from places the others cannot go. Others pointed to Alexander, whose surprising third-place finish in Iowa gave him an instant platform and a claim to having the best chance of bringing Clinton down in the fall. Though Buchanan was dangerous, the Dole operatives still believed he could never win the nomination. So they quickly announced that it had become a Dole-Buchanan race, as though by ignoring Alexander they could make him go away.

The ad team set to work attacking the former Tennessee Governor's record on crime and taxes. But it somehow got its feet stuck in the mud; rather than pivot quickly, the Dole camp worried about the backlash over negative ads and couldn't put its anti-Lamar ad on the air until Thursday night--too late for anyone to see it before the all-important debate, but soon enough for Alexander to attack him for running it. "Lamar has got the three-day luxury of movement," complained a Dole official. "Part of this drill is moving quickly, and we didn't do it."

The Senator's personal appearances weren't helping. As much as Dole probably hates the phrase, if only because of who coined it, it applies to watching him on the campaign trail: you feel his pain. He showed up Tuesday morning for what was to be a triumphant victory speech before the state legislature; these were his people, the sheep of his pasture, and if he ever hoped for an inspiring moment, this was as good a chance as any. But all night his staff had fought over what he should say. The first draft, largely written by Mari Maseng Will, was too strident, too mean, "too much red meat." He called in a Senate staff member to rewrite . and rewrite. When he rose to address the Concord audience gathered in the historic hall of the state capitol, he opened his binder, stared at the pages for a moment and looked seasick. He turned a page, then another, as though they were out of order and he was not sure where to begin. For half an hour he lurched between anecdotes and themes with no transitions. Scattered throughout were homages to Buchanan's message, when he invoked concerns about laid-off workers and the power of the U.N. He said "in conclusion" three times, until he ended virtually in midsentence.

That afternoon he arrived at the Goffstown fire station, to stand before half a dozen firemen and a spray of cameras. The one thing missing was a crowd. Only about 12 supporters turned up, and some were regulars; two were an affluent Marshalltown, Iowa, couple. His voice thick, his eyes red as the truck behind him, Dole began to recite his catechism, but the words never burn into the people who hear them. "It's about ideas, it's about the future," he told the crowd, neglecting to offer up those specific ideas about the future. "It's about character, it's about values, it's about family, it's about whether or not we can make fundamental change." And what is that change? Balancing the budget, he said, not mentioning that it is something everyone now embraces, including the man who already lives in the White House. "Turning power back to the states," which falls in the same bipartisan category. Even his syntax gave him away: Dole spoke in the past tense, giving what sounded like a concession speech. "I've tried to do the right thing," he said.

Every place he went it was the same; the crowd, and his own aides, waited for his soul to crack open, just enough for a quick, reassuring peek. His advisers even imagined what he would say the next time some pretender like Alexander dismissed him as a man worthy of people's respect but not their vote: "I didn't leave a piece of me in Europe only to be told by someone who never served that I didn't have something more to give to my country." But that scalding speech Dole would not give, and even his allies were restless. "It has to come out of his mouth," said a senior Dole adviser hours before the debate. "This is the goddam presidency of the U.S. It falls to him to close the sale."

For Alexander, as skilled and slick a pol as ever pretended not to be one, the week finally gave him his spotlight. He woke up Tuesday morning with all sorts of advantages: he was still an unknown, so his negative ratings were low in a field where everyone else's were rising. He was so cash strapped he could barely afford negative ads, which allowed him to take credit for not running any. The morning after Iowa he spent on a conference call with more than 200 rainmakers, winning their promise to raise at least $5,000 each by week's end. "If we make this a Dole-Alexander race, we're the nominee," said media adviser Mike Murphy.

Alexander's pristine image speaks to his skill in attacking his opponents for their attacks on their opponents. With his genial, schoolteachery manner he can deliver threats in an unthreatening way. He can imply that Bob Dole is too old and it doesn't sound mean, that Bill Clinton is a liar and it doesn't sound disrespectful. When he arrived Tuesday night in Laconia, the hall was packed and sprinkled with plaid; the crowd was ready to shop for something new. Without so much as a stumble, Alexander delivered the smoothest speech since Clinton's State of the Union. By targeting Clinton he gave voters a taste of what a Southern, baby-boom Governor match would look like. "This is a President who reads a book one night and tries everything in it the next day, who feels it's necessary to work out his midlife crisis in public," he said. The crowd laughed; then came the coup de grace. "How can we hope to teach our children right from wrong," he asked, "with Bill Clinton in the White House?"

But before he could take on the President he needed to dethrone the front runner. And so he began to drape the cobwebs on his rival. "I want to say this carefully," he said. "You won't hear me say one word of disrespect for Bob Dole. I don't feel that way and I won't say it. But a lot of people are wishing someone would go to Bob Dole and say, 'It's time to move on.'"

Suddenly in the spotlight, Alexander's challenge was simply to be genuine. His gimmicky campaign of plaid shirts and long walks has suffered not just from want of attention but also from an abundance of contradictions. He is yet another former Nixon staff member posing as an outsider, a man who boasts about his plans to abolish the Education Department he once headed, a man who rails against insiders but seems to have profited handsomely from being one; a man who complains of mudslinging but was the first in the field to use a negative ad, against Pete Wilson last summer. With his sudden prominence, he instantly faced no end of reporters' questions about his financial background and investments.

Alexander was helped by the fact that as Forbes fell, he was the only alternative to Dole in the center-left side of the party. He immediately switched into a message-a-day mode, uncorking conservative virtuecrat Bill Bennett and his endorsement at a village bandstand in snowy, picture-perfect Milford on Wednesday and dusting off earlier proposals during the following days. For Forbes, whose buscapade pulled in across the Milford village green the same morning, the goal was some fast retrofitting. First came the required contrition for the slasher ads: "In business and politics," he said through a clip-on grin, "mistakes can be made. The key is to learn from mistakes. I have, and I'm moving forward."

Far from playing the snarling bully, Pat Buchanan alone seemed to be having fun, winding up, lobbing snowballs at his rivals and savoring the feeling of preaching to the choir. This was the state where he scared George Bush in 1988 by winning 37.4% of the vote. No matter how strong the state's economy has become--unemployment stands at 3.2%, well below the national average--or how many goods are exported with the help of Clinton's hated trade agreements, Buchanan could count on large, rapt, eager crowds wherever he went, of displaced workers and converted flower children and anyone hungry for true conviction. Some proved too zealous even for Buchanan. On Thursday he was forced to suspend his campaign co-chairman Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, when it was revealed that Pratt had spoken to a 1992 gathering in Colorado that included a speaker from Aryan Nations. Buchanan argued that the Republican establishment was trying to destroy him, but the next day, he had to remove his Duval County, Florida, acting chairman, Susan Lamb, a part-time organizer for the National Association for the Advancement of White People.

When he traveled on Wednesday through a blizzard to the North Country hamlet of Littleton, the part of the state that gave him his margin last time, he met his disciples. Lillian Giberson, 84, spent most of her working life working for a Democrat in the Maine legislature. She hobbled across the street in the falling snow to hear Buchanan speak at the Caledonia Opera House. In the pocket of her old blue snow jacket she carried an envelope containing $100. She said she'd been paid $50 by the Alexander campaign to post his sign in her front yard. The other $50 she took from her Social Security check. Before the evening was over, she had stuffed the envelope and its contents into the pocket of Buchanan's immaculately pressed blue suit jacket. "I'm taking from Peter to pay Paul," she said and laughed as she wandered away.

The following night, when the candidates met in Manchester for their debate, the whole game went public and hand to hand. Dole tried to parry the many punches with counterpunches and humor, or sometimes by ignoring them. He lost himself in numbers and bills and vetoes and at times was almost incomprehensible. He talked in the third-person absurd, and Buchanan was caught looking heavenward and rolling his eyes as Dole, head tilted to one side, a little ill at ease, struggled to get through his list.

It would now fall to Dole, his aides said, to try to "win it ugly" over the next couple of days, campaigning hard, using new negative spots on Buchanan and Alexander. The next day the Dole campaign released a text of Alexander's 1985 state-of-the-state speech in which the former Tennessee Governor called for a state income tax, an apostasy in taxophobic New Hampshire.

Each candidate had managed to diminish the others, and so they headed into the crucial last days just where they had been before, only less so. The debate produced no reckless pledges or memorable visions. By the time it was over, many sensed there had been a clear winner, and that it had been Bill Clinton.

--Reported by Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, Nina Burleigh and Tamala M. Edwards/Merrimack

With reporting by JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM, NINA BURLEIGH AND TAMALA M. EDWARDS/MERRIMACK