New Hampshire and beyond

New Hampshire and Beyond

I. With a Sharp Stick

ERNEST HOLLINGS led in the earliest results--the tally of the hamlet of Dixville Notch, which votes at one minute after midnight election morning. The South Carolinian, who had gone to ride the local ski lift in his jogging suit, was rewarded with three Democratic votes and five Republican write-ins. But by evening it was clear that Gary Hart, after a distant but surprising second in Iowa, had decisively upset Fritz Mondale. New Hampshire voters, who have been boosting dark horses since Estes Kefauver, gave one more front-runner a disrespectful poke in the eye.

Five days before the voting, the candidates met for the third debate of the year at St. Anselm's College in Manchester, greeted by mild, no-coats weather and a hundred politely demonstrating right-to-lifers.

Gary Hart was visibly buoyed by his Iowa finish and had spent the last days before the primary touring New Hampshire's cities and towns, addressing his supporters in hopeful and stentorian tones. There were already grumbles from the Hart camp that his former boss, George McGovern, should pull out before the March 13 primary in Massachusetts, so as not to split the "new class' vote.

But McGovern continued to have the time of his life. In the sundown of his career, he has returned to the pedagogic mode, explaining, with humor and charm, a collection of absolutely wild proposals. His campaign has become a major employer of folk guitarists, one McGovern rally even exhuming Arlo Guthrie, or was it Woody?

In this scuffle Alan Cranston was lost, and he sat glumly through the debate. Jesse Jackson was also off his feed as a result of the Hymietown controversy. He twice told the moderator, Barbara Walters, that he was not anti-Semitic, and when she probed him for something more specific, repeated it again. His subsequent preachery flights--"we have forgotten the least of these'--knocked and sputtered.

The relative Right faced a gloomy endgame, a symptom of the death of the Henry Jackson wing of the party. Reubin Askew had attempted an ambush in Iowa with an alliance of Amway distributors and anti-abortionists, to no avail (Iowa right-to-lifers, it seems, did not break their backs for him). Ernest Hollings had targeted New Hampshire for his surprise. Throughout the week he declared forthrightly that Mondale could not win in November and that only he was a credible advocate of fiscal responsibility. Hollings also made it clear what he wanted a solvent government for--continued social spending. The deficit, he charged, had been deliberately swollen by Reagan to drive compassion off the political agenda. Hollings carried Dixville Notch, but in the state as a whole he finished behind Reagan's write-in vote.

The most interesting questions of the evening were a series of hypotheticals, posed by Miss Walters. Candidates are instructed never to answer such questions (Reagan and, classically, Goldwater both have, to their sorrow), the reason being that the ambling speculations that hypotheticals often prompt can yield phrases that become lethal when taken out of context. In a more relaxed setting, however, a plausible hypothetical can elicit useful information about a politician's cast of mind.

What would you as President do, Miss Walters began, in the face of a threat to close the Strait of Hormuz? Hollings, Glenn, and Mondale all contemplated the use of force (Mondale stipulated that we should act with the British and French), and even Jackson, before insisting that we should have better relations with both Iran and Iraq, said that "some things are worth losing lives for.' The worst answer was Hart's--that America could never be in such a fix during his Presidency because it would enjoy energy independence (since Hart is against unclear power, it's hard to see how). In the meantime, he promised that ships and planes would do the dirty work, and "not one American life' would be "put ashore.'

The responses to another hypothetical situation were truly astonishing. Suppose, Miss Walters said, a leftist guerrilla movement appears in Mexico, seeking to establish a Communist government. Mondale thought "those to the south of us' should work out their own destiny. Cranston, seeing and raising, warned that our resistance to "social revolution' in Central America would be the cause of a Mexican blow-up. Jackson declared that we were "embracing the wrong side of history,' and called for derecognizing El Salvador's "killer regime.' McGovern dismissed the problem on the grounds that the Mexican government was "reasonably responsive,' unlike Somoza, who was a "miserable crook' (next to the Mexican graftocrats, Somoza looked like Aristides the Just). Hart said we must address the real cause of Third World unrest, which is poverty, snore. Only Askew seemed to know anything about Mexican realities, and only Hollings said, "Under no circumstance . . . would we allow a Communist regime to arise in Mexico.'