Again The Man to Beat

Eleven a.m., primary day, Nashua, N.H. Lee Atwater, George Bush’s campaign ! manager, is nearly beside himself with nervous energy. He has five phones going in his room at the Clarion Hotel. Ordinarily a health nut, he has mooched several cigarettes from assistants this morning, and puffs on them rapidly like a teenager learning how to smoke. An underling calls with the latest intelligence from fieldworkers: “Bush, by a point or two.” The news is hardly reassuring, but Atwater keeps talking about a comeback. “One way a candidate, particularly a front runner, gets good,” he says, “is to look into the abyss — and realize that he doesn’t like it one little bit.”

During the seven tense days after his crushing defeat in the Iowa caucuses, George Bush gazed deep into the black hole of defeat. The bounce from Iowa allowed Bob Dole to overcome a 20-point deficit in the New Hampshire polls; he seemed poised to knock Bush out in only the first round of the primary season. But during the final weekend before the New Hampshire vote, Bush’s workers launched a brilliant offensive that rescued their man’s candidacy. “I feel that I have a lot in common with Mark Twain,” said Bush, who appeared more relieved than excited after beating Dole, 37% to 28%. “Reports of my death were greatly exaggerated.” Said Deputy Campaign Manager Rich Bond: “I think we’ve got a candidate who’s been through the fire and toughened up.”

It was an odd sort of victory for Bush: just a few weeks ago, beating Dole by fewer than 10 points in New Hampshire would have been considered quite limp. But in the supercharged age of nonstop tracking polls, expectations change almost as fast as the fickle fancies of undecided voters. By the weekend before the voting, polls showed Dole pulling ahead. Surveys taken before the final debate and before the last ads were aired reinforced the conventional wisdom that Bush was collapsing. His last-minute recovery and victory thus became a surprising triumph.

Since he is stronger than Dole in the South, partly because of Ronald Reagan’s popularity there, Bush goes into the Super Tuesday race as the undisputed favorite for the nomination. But Bush’s New Hampshire rebound resolved little; the only thing settled is that nothing will be settled until at least after the Super Tuesday votes are counted on March 8, and perhaps not until the end of the primary season in June. Although the winner-take-all nature of most Republican primaries — and the lack of a large bloc of uncommitted superdelegates — makes a bartered G.O.P. convention far less likely than a bartered Democratic one, the New Hampshire results indicate that both races may go down to the wire.

Part of the reason is Pat Robertson. His fifth-place New Hampshire finish (9% of the vote) did not shake his faith. After all, New England hasn’t been susceptible to the charms of evangelical leaders since the days of the Second Great Awakening in the early 19th century. He pronounced the South his backyard, and is likely to prove it so. By coming in third with 13%, New York Congressman Jack Kemp kept alive his financially strapped candidacy and his hopes of emerging from Robertson’s shadow as the electable conservative challenger. After his fourth-place showing, former Delaware Governor Pete du Pont, an inconsequential player from the start of the race, joined Al Haig on the sidelines. So for the next three weeks at least, four serious candidates will be splitting up the vote.

Bush’s strength in the South is supplemented by impeccable organizations throughout the region, a burgeoning war chest and the support of Governors in South Carolina, Texas, Florida and Oklahoma. As he did in New Hampshire, Bush can hype his loyalty to the President without worrying about an Iowa-style, anti-Reagan populist backlash. In a TIME poll taken last Wednesday and Thursday, Bush beat Dole 53% to 23% in the South.

But Robertson’s no-longer-so-invisible army has been hard at work phoning voters and mailing thousands of Robertson’s What I Will Do as President audiocassettes. Given that 44% of Americans called themselves evangelical or Fundamentalist Christians in TIME’s survey, those tapes may be heard by very sympathetic ears. Robertson feels that victory in the South will prove that he is a legitimate candidate. “I want to make it clear that I am running for the presidency,” said he. “Coming in second or third is nice up to a point. But somewhere down the line, it’s necessary to have a clear win.”

The former televangelist is relying on support from conservative Democrats, who will be allowed to cross over and vote in many of the South’s G.O.P. contests, including those in Texas, Georgia and Virginia. In Louisiana, Kentucky and North Carolina, where cross-over voting is not permitted in the Super Tuesday primaries, Robertson soldiers have for months been organizing drives to reregister sympathetic Democrats as Republicans. Everett Zeagler, registrar of voters in Ouachita Parish in northern Louisiana, processed * hundreds of reregistrations daily before the Feb. 12 deadline, many on forms prepared by the Robertson campaign. “We’ve never seen anything anywhere near this in 20 years,” said Zeagler.

“I am throwing down the gauntlet to George Bush in South Carolina,” said Robertson, referring to the primary that takes place three days before Super Tuesday. “If I lose this one, I’m in trouble.” It will be a direct Bush- Robertson showdown, with Dole staying at a pretty safe distance. Atwater, who hails from the state and cut his teeth managing campaigns there, has rounded up the entire political establishment for the Vice President. “If we don’t win South Carolina,” Atwater said in November, “we might as well pack our bags.” A rattled Atwater was less adamant after Robertson’s second-place finish in Iowa. “They’d love to ambush me and Bush in South Carolina,” he fretted.

Dole’s Southern strategy seems practically nonexistent, his organization scattershot. “We’re only able to fight one battle at a time,” says a Dole ally. “We’re not ready to fight on several fronts at once, and we’re not ready for Super Tuesday.” Moreover, the Senator has failed to cultivate the political movers and shakers who control the G.O.P.’s Southern establishment. Between Bush’s superior organization and Robertson’s appeal to a small but fervent cadre of supporters, Super Tuesday could prove disastrous for Dole.

One hope for the Kansan may be that Robertson does so well in the South that he also damages Bush. Both Dole and Robertson pulled out of last Friday’s Republican debate in Dallas, claiming that their campaigns had received only 60 tickets each for the event and the vast majority of the 2,600 available seats went to Bush supporters. While Dole and Robertson were staying in the same New Hampshire hotel last week, they met to discuss boycotting the debate. The Senator, however, denied persistent rumors that he and Robertson had talked about dividing their resources throughout the South in an effort to conquer Bush. “We don’t need to make a deal,” sniffed Dole’s Florida coordinator, Rocky Pennington.

Dole should poll well in this week’s South Dakota primary and Minnesota caucuses if his Midwestern “one of us” theme plays as well as it did in Iowa. But last week Bush halted his efforts in the South Dakota contest, making any Dole victory there somewhat hollow. The caucus format in Minnesota favors the highly motivated, so the Robertson forces may make a strong showing there.

As Dole toured the South late last week, he seemed depressed and distracted. His press entourage had dwindled. Rally crowds were thin. In a Florida address, the ordinarily aggressive Senator was on the defensive. “Whatever you see on TV ads, Bob Dole is not going to raise taxes,” he said, once again employing the third-person syntax that is beginning to sound like self-parody. “Bob Dole has never raised taxes.”

It was a sudden, startling turnaround for a candidate who had so recently been on top of the world. Basking in the afterglow of his Iowa triumph, Dole poured on the charm in New Hampshire. As his standings in the polls rose, so did the candidate’s spirits. Monday morning he bragged about having slept in, and predicted victory. That night he donned a grandfatherly sweater vest and joined Campaign Manager Bill Brock and two TIME reporters having dinner at his hotel. “Maybe Bush’s huge organization is a myth,” he gloated. He began musing about new supporters. “When are we going to get Uncle Strom on board?” he inquired playfully, referring to South Carolina’s right-wing Senator Thurmond. “My candidate has front runner-itis,” joked Brock. “He keeps wanting more endorsements.”

Dole’s mood darkened as soon as the New Hampshire outcome became clear. Just as victory had seemed to liberate him, defeat sent him reverting to his old caustic persona. During a television hookup with Bush Tuesday night, Dole was asked by NBC’s Tom Brokaw whether he had anything to say to the Vice President. “Yeah,” Dole snarled as he glowered into the camera. “Stop lying about my record.”

After the defeat, Brock was as bitter as his boss, lashing out at Bush’s alleged distortions of the Dole record. “We’re sick to the gills with this kind of tactic,” said Brock. “We don’t have to wallow in the mud with them to answer their charges.” (In fact, the attacks were not so much untrue as they were cheap: Dole has indeed waffled about whether some new revenues might be necessary to tackle the deficit issue. But so at times has Bush.) Behind the scenes, Dole accused his minions of losing the contest for him. “When things go wrong,” said an aide, “Dole’s not the type to blame himself.” At week’s end the Dole staff appeared to be coming unglued. Amid all the angry finger pointing, the Senator’s aides seemed unable to come up with a revamped strategy for their candidate.

In stark contrast to the Dole camp after New Hampshire, the Bush team had refused to crumble into chaos following the Iowa setback. After a few days of dejection, the Vice President’s men mapped out a new strategy and brought in ace Speechwriter Peggy Noonan, a Reagan favorite, to add a human touch to Bush’s bland rhetoric. Bush adopted a man-of-the-people campaign style, touring a shopping mall and a lumberyard, dining at a truck stop and a McDonald’s.

Bush’s point man in the Granite State was Governor John Sununu, a onetime engineer who brought to the New Hampshire campaign the meticulous attention to detail that his former profession demanded. Last summer Sununu screened virtually every one of the 299 Bush precinct captains in New Hampshire. He made sure that thousands of calls to Bush supporters were made every week, keeping the faithful juiced up. Before the Iowa caucuses, he sent out an early warning to Bush workers: expect bad news; don’t let it shake your people; use it as a tool to motivate supporters. When Bush canvassers identified a couple with children away at college, they made sure the students received absentee ballots. “We took this seriously,” said Sununu matter-of-factly. “We did some spadework here.”

But television was the key to Bush’s comeback. After much hedging, Bush decided on the Saturday before the primary to air the commercial that criticized Dole for “straddling” a variety of issues and refusing to oppose tax increases, which eventually led to Dole’s outburst. That night the Vice President appeared on the three major area stations in a half-hour “Ask George Bush” forum. On Monday, Barry Goldwater, grand old man of the right, flew to New Hampshire to endorse Bush and shoot a five-minute commercial with the candidate. “I believe in George Bush,” Goldwater said in the TV spot. “He’s the man to continue the conservative revolution we started 24 years ago.”

Bush’s surge was so sudden that many pollsters missed the trend. Most tracking polls question a relatively small number of voters, usually fewer than 400, in each party every night. The results are then averaged over several days. The weekend before the primary, most tracking polls showed the race dead even. Some, most notably Gallup, gave Dole the lead by as much as 8 points. By Monday most polls detected that Bush was picking up momentum. Dole’s pollster, Richard Wirthlin, found Bush gaining ground but on the basis of his weekend data still insisted the Senator would triumph. The volatility of the poll data could be a troubling sign for both candidates. It is indicative of soft, unreliable support. Bush’s ultimate 10-point victory shows that a good number of voters may have changed their minds just hours before the primary.

The Vice President’s men were quick to cluck over the Bush victory — and to turn up the heat in an effort to rattle their opponent further. “Dole loves to dish it out,” said Atwater, “but if something happens to him, he gets this spoilsport attitude.” Appearing on television’s MacNeil-Lehrer Report, Atwater bragged about the Bush-Sununu grass-roots strategy and said, “If Senator Dole would try to do the same thing, instead of all this bellyaching, he’s probably going to do a lot better.” Taking the bait, Bill Brock later growled, “Lee Atwater ought to grow up.”

New Hampshire’s bottom line: George Bush is again the man to beat for the Republican presidential nomination. Never mind the whiny voice, the uninspiring message, the utter lack of charisma. New Hampshire demonstrated the power of an experienced, thorough campaign organization, the effectiveness of hard-hitting advertising and the priceless importance of being Ronald Reagan’s heir presumptive in the Republican Party. Moreover, Bush has shown that he will not easily fold. For all the cliches about wimpiness, the Vice President does possess the proverbial fire in the belly. “If we learned anything,” said Dole Consultant David Keene, “it’s that we’re going to have to knock him down. He won’t fall down by himself.”