COLUMN ONE : Primaries: a Cocktail Consensus : Election returns alone won’t measure success. In after-deadline banter at a hotel bar, reporters play the expectations game, defining ‘victory’ for each candidate.

In the bar at the Sheraton Tara Wayfarer, where the media drink in their political wisdom, Steve Daley of the Chicago Tribune and Joe Klein of New York magazine are locked in an argument over which unannounced candidate would enter the Democratic presidential race should former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas win the New Hampshire primary today.

In the lobby of the Days Hotel across town, Mitchell Schwartz, chairman of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s New Hampshire campaign, is trying to divine what percentage of the vote his candidate must get for journalists to think he has survived. “What is a strong second-place finish?” he asked Chris Matthews, columnist for the San Francisco Examiner.

At breakfast back at the Wayfarer, David Broder of the Washington Post and Jules Witcover of the Baltimore Sun are discussing what percentage of the vote conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan must win to embarrass the candidacy of President Bush.

After the people of New Hampshire vote today, there will come another, more elusive verdict, one rendered not by the electorate, but by a different jury.

The “monster eye” of the media will judge what the New Hampshire returns mean. And, in the political wilderness of mirrors, where reality is often a matter of perception, history suggests that such a media decision can have a profound influence on who will be President of the United States.

It is the shadow primary of New Hampshire--the fragile game of setting expectations, then watching to see who exceeds or disappoints when the votes are counted. It is arrived at in barroom and street-corner colloquies among the press corps, the pollsters, and campaign operatives who interpret what the results really meant, the voters’ thoughts notwithstanding.

In 1968, anti-Vietnam War candidate Eugene J. McCarthy was deemed the real winner of the Democratic primary even though President Lyndon B. Johnson--a write-in candidate not yet officially in the race--beat McCarthy by eight percentage points. Johnson had been expected to win easily. Shortly after the New Hampshire primary, he said he would not seek reelection.

When Ronald Reagan came within one percentage point of President Gerald R. Ford here in 1976--48% to Ford’s 49.4%--it was declared a defeat for Reagan because he had been expected to do better.

This year, the press has pondered an unusually complex set of questions. Would a Tsongas victory make him the new force to be reckoned with, or would it render New Hampshire unimportant because he is perceived as not electable in November?

Would second place for Clinton, buffeted by unsubstantiated charges of marital infidelity and controversy over his Vietnam-era draft status, show that his campaign had been revived or damaged? Would Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin or Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey be a viable candidate if either should come in fourth?

And in the Republican contest, how big must President Bush win to avoid humiliation, and what percentage of the vote does Buchanan need to be able to press his challenge to Bush in other states?

Lies and Instinct

The shadow primary phenomenon, journalists and politicians agree, is a strange alchemy. Campaign operatives work feverishly to shape prevailing perceptions by arguing--and lying--about what they expect to happen. Opinion polls shape expectations. Historical precedent plays a part. So does gut instinct about a candidate’s qualities and electability.

It all goes into the caldron of conversation after deadline, usually in the bar at the Wayfarer, headquarters of spin and speculation here.

In the end, it is not necessarily the voters in other primary states who are influenced by the media assessment of results in New Hampshire. It is the campaign contributors and party insiders who pay heed, by rushing to the perceived victor and abandoning perceived losers--and that can kill a struggling campaign.

“How do we decide this? Arbitrarily,” said columnist Jack Germond, a dean of the press corps and the Wayfarer crowd. “I think it is based on some kind of consensus that develops in the Wayfarer.”

“I think this is equal parts osmosis and barroom chatter,” said Walter Robinson, a respected political reporter for the Boston Globe. “Whether it is justifiable or not, it seems to me that it will have the effect the pundits say it will. The generally arrived-at journalistic spin will become reality.”

Inevitable Influence

Some journalists wish it could be different. “The coverage of politics would be better if you could get these people to stay in separate hotels and forbid them drinking together,” said William Greider, a veteran political reporter covering the campaign for Rolling Stone.

But the expectations game, most journalists say, is inevitable, perhaps even necessary. The ebb and flow of the race, however mysterious, influence both voters and candidates and cannot be ignored.

The problems that have beset Bill Clinton’s campaign, for instance, must be considered in any analysis of the race.

“I think people have learned that you can’t go back and play the game over again” when questions surround a campaign, said Germond. “Otherwise, you could cover the campaign with stenographers. Presumably, we bring some knowledge and history to this.”

The expectations game has a rich history. In New Hampshire’s 1972 Democratic primary, for example, Sen. Edmund S. Muskie, from neighboring Maine, was favored to win. With just days to go in that year’s race, Germond and another reporter interviewed a senior Muskie campaign strategist who made the mistake of setting too-high expectations for her candidate.

“She told us, ‘If we don’t get 50%, we’ll be really disappointed,’ ” Germond recalled. “We almost dropped our drawers, but not our pens.”

Muskie won the primary with 46.4% of the vote. South Dakota Sen. George S. McGovern got 37.1%. The press described the returns as a blow to Muskie, and that interpretation helped to propel McGovern to the nomination.

Was the media verdict unfair?

Germond doesn’t think so. “If you look at somebody who does not seem very prepossessing . . . and that candidate comes along and does really well, as in the case of McGovern, that tells you something is wrong with Muskie.”

The perceptions can shift wildly in short periods of time. What matters is where they are on Election Day.

In 1976, Reagan was given little chance of challenging President Ford in New Hampshire. But in the final weeks, the polls, the crowds, the response of voters suggested Reagan was gaining tremendous momentum, and that sense was reinforced by reporters gathering in the bar at the Wayfarer after deadline to compare impressions.

A few days before the primary, veteran Associated Press columnist Walter Mears recalled, Reagan campaign aide Madeline Thompson appeared on “Meet the Press” and predicted Reagan would get 55% of the vote.

Ford won, though by less than two percentage points. “We all wrote that Reagan got beat,” Mears said.

Reagan rallied later in the race, but Ford’s perceived comeback in New Hampshire allowed him to hold onto party support and take the nomination.

Dole, Bush in ’88

In 1988, Kansas Sen. Bob Dole initially was given little chance of winning New Hampshire’s Republican primary over New England-born Bush. But, fresh from defeating then-Vice President Bush in the Iowa caucuses the week before, Dole arrived here as the favorite. When Bush won by nine percentage points in New Hampshire, a victory once viewed as inevitable became the key to his nomination.

This year, shifting perceptions again have been important.

Eight weeks ago, Bill Clinton had little organization in New Hampshire. “We thought we would have been lucky to come in third,” said Clinton political consultant Frank Greer. The Clinton camp was concentrating on the March primaries in the South and in Illinois.

Then Clinton surged ahead in fund raising. He seemed to have the most cogent message and made the cover of Time magazine as the consensus front-runner. Seated around the hexagonal bar at the Wayfarer, reporters talked about the increasing likelihood of a Clinton landslide in New Hampshire, and how that, with the campaign’s focus next shifting toward his native South, in effect could wrap up the nomination for him.

Then came the punishing combination: tabloid allegations of marital infidelity and questions about Clinton’s draft record. By early February, reporters were discussing whether Clinton would drop out if he finished third here.

“We were falling and there was a real sense of a death knell,” Greer said.

Late last week, after he answered voters’ questions during two 30-minute television programs he had paid for and polls showed him rising slightly, some perceived Clinton to be on the rebound. The question in the expectations game became: what percentage of the vote would represent a “respectable” second-place showing for Clinton?

Opinion polls here have greater influence than most reporters say they would like. Pollsters such as NBC’s Mary Klette believe so-called tracking polls can be useful in measuring trends, but that publishing their results is misleading because such surveys contact only small numbers of likely voters, say 200 or so, on successive nights.

Nonetheless, at about 10:30 each night in the Wayfarer, reporters from “tracking” organizations, such as CNN, USA Today and the Boston Globe, come to the bar with the latest numbers, and they often draw a crowd. The results are repeated daily on television and in the papers, as if they had a meaning beyond what they have.

Now, with Tsongas the consensus front-runner, the expectations game threatens to bedevil him.

“You feel the monster eye swinging around,” said Greider of Rolling Stone. “Having destroyed Clinton, let’s see if this new guy can take it.”

For instance, journalists already are preparing stories identifying the primaries Clinton must win to prove that victory here was not a regional anomaly.

Campaign operatives have become wiser and more aggressive about trying to manage expectations.

“People try to set high and low figures for each other,” Germond said. He added that “it is all a game,” one with a good measure of deceit.

“You hear the Bush people say Buchanan will probably get 35%. What they probably mean is 27%.”

Historical precedent also plays a part in setting the levels by which the media will judge returns. Most reporters agree, for instance, that if Buchanan should get 40% of the vote it would be devastating to Bush. That figure harkens back to the ’68 campaign.

McCarthy Vote

“Buchanan’s 40% was set by Gene McCarthy,” said Joe Klein of New York magazine. He was referring to the 42% of the vote McCarthy got in ‘68, which proved to be enough to end Johnson’s candidacy for reelection.

Reporters approach the expectations game with some trepidation. The voters have been known to ignore their verdict--especially if the media declare someone a loser while he or she still has money.

In 1980, NBC’s Tom Petit flatly declared Reagan dead as a candidate the day after he lost the Iowa caucuses to Bush. Reagan went on to crush Bush in the New Hampshire primary and to win the GOP nomination.

The divining of meaning in New Hampshire this year is particularly difficult on the Democratic side.

Trudging behind Iowa Sen. Harkin during a campaign stop at a toxic waste dump Friday, Joseph Day, the veteran political editor for Boston’s WBZ-TV, asked other reporters, only half facetiously: “What do we do if Paul Tsongas actually wins this thing?”

“If you take 100 reporters, I don’t think there are five who think he can be nominated,” said Germond, “but I would never never count him out. I had a hard time imagining Ronald Reagan wasn’t too old in 1980.”

Witcover, who writes a column with Germond, agreed. “People say if Clinton loses, he is gone. That is ridiculous. And (reporters say) if Tsongas wins or loses he is gone either way. That is also ridiculous, because he has enough money to go on.

“The field is very confused and predictions are a dime a dozen,” he said.

Inexorably, the media calculus is moving on, to the question of which primaries after New Hampshire’s will be the key tests. “The view is fairly widely shared now that if Clinton finishes second here, he has to win in Georgia on March 3 or he is dead,” said Robinson of the Boston Globe. “If (his) problems here are problems in the South, then he cannot be a credible general-election candidate.”

On Sunday, ABC News’ Cokie Roberts identified Maryland’s March 3 primary as crucial, and went so far as to say that Tsongas had to win it to prove himself more than a regional candidate.

The math is somewhat easier on the Republican side.

Reporters over the weekend were guessing that Buchanan would do better than suggested by the polls, which most often show him getting about 28% of the vote, in part because, on Saturday, Bush started accusing Buchanan of lying about him and of using negative tactics--a sign of concern in the Bush campaign.

Could that be true? Might Bush really be in trouble? Even if Buchanan does well here, can he do so elsewhere? Media observers will speculate but they cannot be sure.

“The glorious thing about politics,” said Ellen Warren of Knight Ridder Newspapers, “is that nobody really knows what’s going on.”