1988 Presidential Race Is Already Under Way : New Hampshire, Iowa More Crucial Than Ever as Open Contests Take Shape in Both Parties

Richard Snierson, a 42-year-old lawyer whose passions are his teen-age son and daughter and skiing the White Mountains, had not done a lick of politics for 20 years--not since the summer between college and law school. “I just got turned off,” he says now, “like a lot of other people.”

But this winter, Snierson is back in the process. Even though it’s a full 11 months before New Hampshire’s 1988 presidential primary, he is working nights and weekends to line up volunteers for a Democratic hopeful, Bruce Babbitt.

In a 200-year-old farmhouse on Pleasant Street in rural Loudon, about 20 miles north of here, Jean McLaurin, a bustling matron old enough to remember torchlight parades on election eve in her native Connecticut, already has given two receptions and taught herself how to use a personal computer--all for the greater good of GOP presidential contender Jack Kemp, the conservative congressman from New York.

Recruiting Friends

In her good-natured but relentless style, she also has recruited about 100 friends and neighbors to type letters and stuff envelopes on his behalf. “Many people are in politics to get something for themselves,” said McLaurin, who believes Kemp’s economic prescriptions are vital to the country’s future. “I’m doing this for my children and grandchildren.”

Such activity may seem premature to most Americans, who will not start thinking seriously about presidential politics until sometime next year, but the efforts of Snierson, McLaurin and scores of others reflect a salient fact about the 1988 presidential campaign:

This time around, the campaign for the nation’s highest office is starting earlier than ever, and this is spurring candidates to break new ground in search of support and drawing thousands of ordinary people into politics at a time when most of their fellow citizens have their minds on other things.

Two factors are primarily responsible for the speed-up:

First, both major political parties are in turmoil. Unpredictable winds of change are bringing new faces, new opportunities and new uncertainties. After their landslide defeats of 1980 and 1984, Democrats are searching for ideas appealing enough to replace the New Deal ideology that had long dominated American politics. Republicans are groping for a sequel to the Reagan Revolution--a quest made vastly more difficult in the shock waves from the Iran- contra scandal.

“Both parties are changing generational leadership at the same time, for the first time in decades,” said Glenn Kenton, chairman of the presidential campaign of Pierre S. (Pete) du Pont, the Republican former governor of Delaware. “This is a wide open race.”

Second, the delegate-selection timetable has been drastically accelerated by widespread changes in the scheduling of primary elections and caucuses, so candidates are forced to crank up their efforts sooner.

Carter Started Early

Back in 1976, Jimmy Carter scored a startling victory in Iowa’s January precinct caucuses largely because he had begun campaigning there the previous February, for an unprecedented early start. By February, 1987 (the comparable point in this campaign), Democratic Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri had been campaigning in Iowa so long and so hard that he could name 80 party activists who were backing his candidacy, most of them personally recruited.

Gephardt has scarcely been the Lone Ranger. Republican Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas stumped Iowa 14 times last year, and press aide Beverly Tauke said that, later this month, he will release “a couple of hundred” names of his supporters there--the names of “people who will have influence on their communities.”

In Michigan, Republicans have gone so far as to begin the actual selection of delegates, using a Rube Goldberg-like system that forced supporters of Vice President George Bush to compete with Kemp and broadcast evangelist Pat Robertson as long ago as last August for precinct delegate slots in the state’s party primary.

The actual makeup of the state’s convention delegation will not be known until next January, but the results already have damaged Bush’s front-runner status and given a boost to Robertson’s long-shot candidacy.

The change in the 1988 delegate-selection calendar likely to have the greatest impact, however, is the establishment of a Southern regional primary. On March 8, 1988, the voters of 14 states will choose delegates to each of the national conventions.

Southern Primary Strategy

By the time this megaprimary ends--four weeks after the Iowa caucuses mark the traditional beginning of the campaign and three weeks after the New Hampshire primary--nearly 40% of all the delegates to the 1988 presidential nominating conventions will have been chosen.

The South’s primary is expected to narrow the field of contenders greatly. “If there are three people who come out of it,” said Du Pont’s man, Kenton, “one of of them will be dead and not know it.”

Largely because of the pressures generated by this accelerated calendar, candidates are relying heavily on volunteers such as McLaurin and Snierson to ease the demands on their own time and extend their reach.

McLaurin pledged her support to Kemp after she read of his supply-side economic theories and heard him speak at a local Republican dinner in 1985. “All politicians know the right thing to say,” McLaurin said, “but he knows the right things to do and how to get them done.”

The wife of a manufacturing executive, she is the kind of cheerful and unpretentious woman who offers visitors homemade beef stew and hot apple pie. She also has the energy to paint the outside of the family farmhouse herself every three years. She has installed a personal computer in her living room and taught herself how it works.

She uses it to help get out Kemp campaign mail, but she values the help of other people more than that of the high-powered IBM, and has not been shy about signing up her neighbors.

One of McLaurin’s star recruits is Kathleen Jones, who lives across the street. Jones, a young mother with another child on the way, says that her enthusiasm for Kemp was ignited when the congressman spoke at her graduation from Clarkson College in Upstate New York in 1978. Jones intends to type campaign letters and help out at receptions. “The littlest bit is so important,” she said.

McLaurin’s Democratic counterpart is Snierson. He was contacted in February, 1986, by a Babbitt campaign aide who got his name from a law school chum of Snierson’s in Phoenix. Snierson signed on as a volunteer after he met Babbitt and adjudged him conservative enough to win support among New Hampshire’s flinty Democrats.

Snierson and his wife sponsored a bagels-and-quiche brunch for the touring candidate. Snierson also arranged for Babbitt to climb New Hampshire’s Mt. Washington (second-highest peak east of the Mississippi), which won Babbitt some attention in the local press.

Credit for Enthusiasm

“It was a way for a dark horse to distinguish himself,” said Chris Hamel, the Babbitt aide who recruited Snierson and who now runs Babbitt’s Iowa operation. “He (Snierson) was our first supporter in New Hampshire. He is a partner in one of the state’s largest law firms and a guy active in the community on the periphery of politics. His enthusiasm has been a big help.”

Snierson, asked to estimate the impact of his political efforts, said: “I don’t know that you can have a big effect, but you can be a sounding board.”

Similar sentiments are expressed by Georgia Atwood, a working mother of two in Claremont, N.H.

Though she turned down the Gephardt campaign staff’s request that she give a coffee for the candidate (“We have dogs and cats and kids running around, and my house doesn’t have a dining room”), she has been helping to plan a reception at the roomier home of a neighbor.

Atwood, who was approached because her brother is a Gephardt supporter in St. Louis, hopes to set an example for her two teen-age daughters. “I’d like to see my kids interested in politics and having some knowledge of it,” she said.

Unsure About Candidate

Atwood is not at all certain she wants to back Gephardt, however. As a strong foe of abortion, she is troubled by his decision to abandon his previous support of a constitutional amendment to ban it. “He said one thing and then backed down,” she said.

Although the number of delegates being courted by people such as Atwood, McLaurin and Snierson in Iowa and New Hampshire pales by comparison with the prize offered by the 14-state Southern regional primary, efforts like theirs appear to be more important than ever.

The stated purpose of the regional primary was to give the South more influence in the nominating process, but the net result of the Southern politicians’ efforts, in the view of most strategists, has been to make the earlier contests in Iowa and New Hampshire even more crucial than they were in the past.

The reasoning is that candidates will have too little time or money to wage all-out campaigns for the support of the 50 million people in the Southern primary states. Thus they will have to perform well--better than expected, at least--in Iowa and New Hampshire in order to stand a chance in the South.

And the intensity of the competition in the two early-primary states, where the pools of political pros are relatively small, can produce some startling results:

Rivals Are Married

Beverly Tauke, a former aide to Iowa Republican Sen. Charles E. Grassley and a key member of the Dole team, is married to Iowa’s Rep. Tom R. Tauke, another Republican who happens to be a leading Bush supporter.

“We both get a charge out of it (their difference in allegiance),” Beverly Tauke said, “but we have to watch what we say to each other.”

Democrats also understand the importance of doing early spadework in Iowa.

As governor of Arizona until last year, Babbitt’s time for out-of-state travel was limited. He did make his political presence felt in Iowa by assigning two young women, whose salaries were paid by his political action committee, to help that state’s Democrats in last fall’s elections. Both women are now on Babbitt’s own Iowa campaign staff.

Even Jesse Jackson--whose main strength lies not in the cornfields of Iowa but in the Northern industrial and Southern states that have substantial black populations--has used Iowa to suggest his potential for reaching beyond his black base, by appealing to discontented farmers.

On Super Bowl night last January, Jackson drew a crowd of about 800 people in Greenfield, Iowa, to hear him declare: “Farmers and displaced workers, urban and rural, black and white, young and old, we must all join together to chart a new course.”

Bush, Hart on Outside

Moreover, Bush, the GOP front-runner, and Democratic front-runner Gary Hart, the former senator from Colorado, both appear to have been hurt at least temporarily by putting less effort into Iowa than some Iowans would like.

Rep. Tauke worries that Iowa could be a stumbling block for Bush, because the burdens of the vice presidency “make it hard for him to get out and touch the people.” Bush tackled the problem last week in a two-day swing through the state.

As for Hart, campaign manager Bill Dixon acknowledges that “certain people are furious” over Hart’s decision to cancel three scheduled appearances in Iowa--the only visits he had planned to make last year--so that he could vote in Senate roll calls. “We were threatened at the time,” Dixon said. “We knew about it. We chose to stay in the U.S. Senate.” But he added: “There is time to heal those wounds.”

Important as the candidates’ visits and volunteers’ efforts are, the ultimate success or failure of a presidential campaign depends heavily on another, generally less visible activity: fund-raising.

All the factors that have quickened the pace of campaign organizing and planning also have spurred on efforts to collect the cash that is the lifeblood of every candidacy. “The first three things a presidential candidate must do this year,” said Richard Williamson, a veteran of the 1980 Reagan campaign, “are raise money, raise money and raise money.”

In 1983, the year before the last presidential election, Democrat Walter F. Mondale raised and spent $10 million. Some critics said that Mondale was wasteful, but John Reilly, a senior adviser to the former vice president, says that the expenditures--largely used to establish organizations in the early-primary states--made possible Mondale’s ultimate victory over Democratic rival Hart.

“It was absolutely necessary,” Reilly said. “It was the only thing that saved us from the tidal wave of Gary Hart after New Hampshire.” Mondale, almost universally regarded as the Democratic front-runner in 1983, was rocked by Hart’s unexpectedly powerful showing in the 1984 New Hampshire primary.

With the exception of Bush, who rivals believe can raise as much as he needs, and perhaps Pat Robertson, who has an extensive network of small contributors familiar with his “700 Club” television show, most of the 1988 contenders will have trouble matching Mondale’s double-digit harvest in 1987.

Other GOP Contenders

Bush’s rivals, besides Kemp, Dole, Du Pont and Robertson, include former Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig Jr. and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. Hart already faces competition from Delaware Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., Jackson, Babbitt and Gephardt. Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis and Arkansas Sen. Dale Bumpers are expected to announce within the next week or so whether they, too, will run.

Among Republicans, Dole--helped by his prestige as a Senate leader--hopes to raise about $6 million this year, according to David Keene, his senior adviser. Gephardt’s campaign manager, William Carrick, estimated that his candidate will take in a similar sum.

Whatever their goals, all of the candidates hope to get enough money to establish organizations in New Hampshire, Iowa and the other key states, to allocate funds to early television campaigns and, generally, to keep themselves alive until next year, when they can start receiving federal matching funds. (The government matches all contributions received this year and next, up to $250 for each contribution.)

The soliciting of financial support, in countless phone calls and through myriad receptions, represents a major drain on candidate time. Kemp aide John Buckley estimated that it will take up a third of his man’s schedule.

Although most of the contenders have recruited experienced fund-raisers, for the lesser-known candidates, this does not relieve the demand for a lot of face-to-face contact.

“You don’t have many people who never met Joe Biden who are called by the hottest fund-raiser in Chicago and asked for $1,000 and just say, ‘Yes,’ ” said John Reilly, now a Biden adviser.

“They say, ‘I’d like to have a look at the fellow.’ ”