Media-Heavy Race Crashes New Hampshire’s Cherished House Parties : Politics: This year, fewer of the candidates are meeting the state’s voters face to face. Local television is an increasing force in the campaign.

At the house party in Dan Callaghan’s living room, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska had delivered 20 well-chosen minutes on his vision for America when he suddenly excused himself. He had to do a “live interview” on the front lawn, he explained, for the local Manchester television station’s 6 o’clock news.

But don’t leave, an aide told the house party guests. Move into the den and watch the senator on the television set.

Like the last clothing mill that closed in this troubled city a year ago, the last endearing myth about New Hampshire politics is dying. This year, the candidates for President no longer are campaigning primarily in the style New Hampshire is celebrated for, meeting voters one at a time and face to face, so-called “retail” politics.

Candidates are attending fewer public events, often only two or three a day. And gatherings as small as the Callaghan house party are often bright with the hot glare of TV lights.

The retail politics of New Hampshire is being replaced by a hybrid, in which the state’s voters fight for standing room at events with reporters and increasingly see the campaign through the filter of the media, particularly local television.

“The great myth of New Hampshire is that voters make up their minds by seeing the candidate in person. Baloney,” ABC political director Hal Bruno said.

The difference is potentially significant. The logic of holding early primaries in small states like New Hampshire is that it enables at least some of the nation’s voters to make up-close, in-person judgments of the candidates. Now that may no longer be so true.

One question raised by this change is whether New Hampshire’s often independent voters will accept the framing given this race by the media: the anointment of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton as the early Democratic front-runner, followed by speculation that unsubstantiated adultery allegations could cause him to tumble; the idea that former Democratic Sen. Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts, despite winning praise for many of his proposals, is unelectable because of a lack of charisma; the perception that President Bush must win the Republican primary by a huge margin over conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan to avoid embarrassment.

Three major factors have led to the diminishment of retail politics:

* The campaign’s late start left the candidates without the months needed to meet voters in person.

* With Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin in the Democratic race, the national media are ignoring the Feb. 10 Iowa caucuses and focusing all of their attention on New Hampshire, transforming by their presence the house parties, diner stops and handshaking tours into partial media events.

* The growing appetite for news of local television--New Hampshire’s lone local network affiliate station and those in nearby Boston--is changing how candidates campaign.

At the center of the change is the question: How does the media filter change the character of the information voters receive?

Two events in a recent campaign day for Tsongas illustrate the potential difference. At a meeting in Concord at a conservation center, Tsongas talked passionately about the environment for an hour with 30 citizens. When a woman accused him of being afraid to buck the party Establishment, Tsongas silenced the room by talking about his protracted struggle to overcome cancer. Tsongas said that once, when he thought he was dying, he lay in a hospital bed thinking about how his 2-year-old daughter would grow up without knowing him. That was fear. After facing that, nothing in this campaign or in politics could frighten him, he said.

But an interview Tsongas gave later on WMUR-TV--the Manchester television station that is the state’s lone network affiliate--lacked the candor of that exchange. In the minute and 45 seconds WMUR allots for most interviews, Tsongas recited his stock emphasis that the Democratic Party needs to redesign its approach to economics. It was not merely the breadth of information about the candidate that was absent. It was a certain kind of engagement.

New Hampshire voters can still meet candidates if they really want to. “These guys are still going out to Berlin, still going to Plymouth,” WMUR-TV news director Jack Heath said.

But voters like Carl Goodman, the former president of the Hillsborough, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, said the meet-the-candidates events are not what they once were. “If they come up my way now, they just go to a factory or something. They don’t wander into a cafe and sit down and chat the way they once did.”

And this year, Goodman said, he has not been invited to a single house party.

When candidates do go out in public, much of the flesh they are pressing is wearing press credentials.

Campaign officials also say the use of phone banks and direct mail to reach voters--techniques more closely associated with larger states--are assuming greater importance in New Hampshire.

Despite these changes, the new hybrid politics of New Hampshire remains a far cry from the hermetically sealed exercise that will come in the fall, when most voters who meet the candidates are virtual television props who attend events by invitation only. Even the television has a more personal quality to it.

The NBC station WBZ-TV in nearby Boston, for instance, is airing a feature called “Ask the Candidate,” in which voters pose questions on camera that a particular White House hopeful then answers on the 11 p.m. news.

Perhaps the largest single change in New Hampshire’s media mix is the growing role of WMUR. The ABC affiliate is nearly 40 years old, but news director Heath said it began covering local news more seriously in the mid-1980s. The station now has 32 employees on its news staff, and audience numbers suggest that it has become the largest single news source in the state, eclipsing the stridently conservative Manchester Union Leader.

More than 80,000 people--about three-quarters of the total expected to vote in the Democratic primary--watch WMUR’s 6 p.m. newscast, and that is only one of five 30-minute news shows it produces each day.

When President Bush visited New Hampshire for the first time earlier this month, the only interview he granted was six minutes live on the station. And most days, any candidate in the state will rearrange his schedule to go to WMUR for an interview.

Some of the coverage by other local television stations also is quite detailed.

But even in heavy doses, a candidate delivered electronically to a voter in his home or even through the words of a newspaper is not the same as one encountered in person. One ingredient that is often missing is spontaneity.

Take Kerrey’s interview outside the Callaghan house party. The earpiece Kerrey was wearing failed, rendering him unable to hear the anchorman.

But Kerrey had been told in advance what he would be asked, so he answered anyway.