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0 Comments | Insight on the News, Feb 26, 1996 | by Jamie Dettmer

Jeff Greenfield of ABC News looked displeased. "What's happening here? Will we get in?" he snapped at one of multimillionaire publisher Steve Forbes' young advance men. Brutal New Hampshire cold had made the press corps irritable and the smirks were icy when the newly arrived Greenfield stepped forward to demand access to the candidate of the hour.

Well-known broadcast face or not, the young man wouldn't budge. "The house may be too small for all of you," he said as he ushered local guests past the crowd of press people, cameras and boom mikes and into Barbara and George Pressley's lovingly maintained 19th-century clapboard house in the smafl town of Nashua. Scheduled as just another of the cozy neighborhood meetings for which the Granite State primary is famous, the occasion quickly turned into a cheek-by-jowl circus jumbling up neatly dressed Nashua families clutching pies covered with aluminum foil and frenzied journalists outfitted in L.L. Bean jackets, vests and boots.

New Hampshire claims to be the last redoubt of retail politics, but down-home charm and face-to-face meetings with the candidates clash with the urgency of newspaper deadlines and, more importantly, the imperatives of network news programs. Kitchen-table electioneering in this tiny state of 1 million can't compete with the glitz of the big time - and, as in every other state, TV spots increasingly outweigh campaign stops.

Of course, the inevitable happened at the Pressleys'home on Jan. 29 - the media pack was allowed in, provoking a crush and prompting protests of "Get that camera out of my back," and worse, from infuriated voters. "When I asked all of you to come and meet Steve Forbes I said you could invite the world," Barbara Pressley told her guests. "Little did I know the world would be here."

The media's insistence on entry was understandable and so was Forbes' willingness to comply. Only hours before, a campaign bombshell exploded and its reverberations are likely to be felt for some time. Forbes' upbeat and almost robotic low-tax mantra of "hope, growth and opportunity" - and more likely his onslaught of attack ads against his rivals that flaunt his outsider status and tap into the rich vein of anti-Washington sentiment - was abruptly rewarded with a New Hampshire opinion poll suggesting he had pulled ahead of presumptive Republican nominee Bob Dole by 4 percentage points.

Forbes was bestowed with instant credibility by the media as the front-runner. Dole's air of inevitability, already compromised by the Senate majority leader's much-criticized "grumpy old man" response the previous week to President Clinton's energetic and politic State of the Union address, evaporated in a welter of stories explaining that the Dole-Forbes clash had become the GOP's main event. And the ghosts of Dole's 1988 last-minute defeat at the hands of George Bush in New Hampshire were resurrected once again.

In the stories that flowed after the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released its poll little thought was given to how Forbes could parlay a New Hampshire victory - or an Arizona one, for that matter, as the first-time candidate also is said to be ahead in that state - into the GOP nomination. How would the free-spending magnate fare in the Deep South, where the campaign heads after the New Hampshire primary and where Forbes has little organization? "I don't think Forbes will know what to do with a New Hampshire win," says Jim Courtovich, Sen. Phil Gramm's New Hampshire campaign manager. "What's the strategy and where are the votes and coalitions for him?"

But mass media harboring a deep-seated bias in favor of novelty have been showing scant interest in looking ahead. As in the early days of billionaire Ross Perot's 1992 challenge, the media are engrossed with the idea of the new and the bizaffe and still are in the infatuation stage of their affair with the publisher. Only a few voices have been raised to question the viability of a Forbes nomination. It took a seasoned contrarian like William Safire to write against the trend in the New York Times. "Steve Forbes is this fortnight's vogue story ... He is not going to be our next president. Nor is this relative stranger going to be the Republican nominee."

Stumping in Iowa, Dole complained that Forbes' surge in the polls "shows that if you've got enough money and you don't get any scrutiny from the media" you can rise. The Senate majority leader had a point. When the news circulated among the far-flung press corps covering the campaign in this first-primary state Forbes was like a bright light to moths. He started the day at the Nashua Country Club with about 15 journalists; by mid-afternoon the swarm around the flat-tax advocate had swollen to more than 50. From Washington and New York more journalists and talking heads arrived: Margaret Warner, chief Washington correspondent for the influential News-Hour with Jim Lehrer, parachuted in for the evening and Nightline journalists also joined the frenzy.