White House Candidates Are on Thin Granite : Politics: New Hampshire is key to the presidential race. But hard times mean that the hopefuls must bring some substance, not just style.

A lot can be learned about a state from its license plates. There is room, along the bottom of the metal tag, to say one thing about a place, and say it precisely. Cut to the heart of the matter.

Florida sums itself up as a land of restful ease: The Sunshine State. Oklahoma reflects on its own down-home simplicity: Oklahoma Is OK. You’ve Got a Friend in Pennsylvania, says that state, evoking its peaceful Quaker heritage.

New Hampshire plates say Live Free or Die.

That tang of hard-edged, unromantic, practical Puritanism is a dominant flavor in this year’s presidential primary. The gaudy, grinning campaign themes of yesteryear--the Mornings in America wrapped in red, white and blue bunting--have given way to grim, hardheaded soundings of themes such as atonement, responsibility, honesty and rigor.

Ponder, for example, the puritanical air of former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas’ Democratic primary campaign, which seems to be striking a chord with his New Hampshire neighbors. Audiences have been cheering his spare, unadorned message, and forgiving a platform persona bland as Yankee pot roast.

“Some day there will be an accounting . . . and we will have to respond. ‘What did you do? What did you do!’ ” he said during a recent appearance at St. Paul’s School in Concord.

“We are all going to die. I’m gonna die. You’re gonna die. We all have a responsibility to make this country better,” Tsongas said. “You won’t see any Japan-bashing ads from me that says they’re the problem. They’re not the problem. We’re the problem . . . . God is not going to protect us from our own lack of will and discipline.”

For that, Tsongas received vigorous applause.

Tones struck in this influential primary are likely to reverberate throughout the nationwide campaign. “As the first primary in the nation, in some sense we do focus and sharpen and shape the kind of issues the candidates campaign on,” said Dartmouth College government professor Dick Winters.

Rocky and resolute, New Hampshire still wears the markings of original New England, the land of plain, willful Calvinists, of preacher Jonathan Edwards and his Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. When George Bush recently aired an ad showing him being scolded by a voter, her hand jabbing little lightning bolts at the presidential chest, the impression deepened that this might be the year of Sinners in the Hands of an Angry Electorate.

“Look, I don’t care about style this time around,” said Patty Berthiaume, a nurse at a Manchester blood bank. Her fiance, Bill Morey, nodded his agreement. “We just need someone who won’t lie to us anymore,” he said.

Likewise Gary Furst, president of the American Brush Co. in Claremont, praised unadorned virtues when he welcomed Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, a Democrat, to his factory. “He may speak a little different, but he speaks from the heart, which is what counts here in New Hampshire,” said Furst, who observed of the nation that “We’ve lost our way.”

A Los Angeles Times poll found that New Hampshire voters displayed a slightly magnified version of the nation’s pessimism and growing hostility toward the incumbent President. The magnification is understandable; this state has taken the recession square in the chops. When would-be presidents last came here, in 1988, New Hampshire led the nation in job growth. Now, it is last.

But if history is any guide, the next President will be a candidate who connects with New Hampshire’s mood. Since 1952, no one has won the White House without first winning this primary.

There has always been a dour side to passing that hurdle. Campaigning in New Hampshire is a kind of ordeal, a justification by deeds and mortification of the flesh. The setting and the audiences are tough. “They call New Hampshire ‘the Granite State’ as much for the character of the people as for the geology,” said Robert D. Richardson, a biographer of those quintessential New Englanders Emerson and Thoreau.

When presidential aspirants are not shaking hands by the hundreds or enduring coffee shop interrogations, they are trudging through slush or creeping along winding roads slick with frozen rain. The image of a faltering candidate forlorn among the falling flakes--like Edmund S. Muskie, circa 1972, crying in a Manchester snowstorm--is an archetype of the New Hampshire experience.

Add to that this year a strong sense that America has fallen away from the simple values that shaped the country from the first Pilgrim winters. This is a bad time for feel-good candidates.

A hard state in hard times makes for a hard campaign. In these parts, the saying goes, there are nine months of winter and three months of damn poor sledding.

For the candidates of 1992, the winter and the tough sledding have come together.