POLITICS : Candidates Flock to New Hampshire’s King of All News Media : Presidential hopefuls court an an ex-Deadhead who reports for the state’s top TV station.

The scene is red-brick Manchester, N.H., a chilly former industrial outpost along the graceful Merrimack River, four months before the crucial New Hampshire primary. All 10 men who would be the Republican presidential nominee are here for a debate-cum-media event on WMUR-TV, to be broadcast nationally on Cable News Network.

Who’s the most important guy in town as the cameras start to roll?

Fast forward to the first two weeks in December, when those who would be president race to nearby Concord to file for the first-in-the-nation presidential primary, when every day there’s at least one news conference.

Who’s the Big Man on Camera now? Who’s the guy who will likely retain that status until the Feb. 20 primary has come and gone, through all those Rotary Club lunches and Kiwanis breakfasts, those days when the candidates ache to be on the 6 o’clock news because it’s so much cheaper than buying an ad?

The fellow in the middle of both of these scenes is not Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, the front-runner for the GOP nomination, or any of his rivals. It’s not national news honchos such as Tom Brokaw or Peter Jennings.

At this moment, in this state, the spotlight is on Carl Cameron.

Who?

The clean-cut blond with the flapping overcoat and baritone voice has interviewed Dole about three dozen times in the past 18 months; conservative commentator Patrick J. Buchanan three times that. “P.S.: I still have your home phone number in my pocket,” joked Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas in a recent letter.

Cameron, 34, is the chief political correspondent at the only statewide television station in the home of the first make-’em-or-break-’em contest of the presidential election cycle.

His station takes politics so seriously that, on the day O.J. Simpson’s murder case went to the jury, its newscasts led with California Gov. Pete Wilson’s withdrawal from the presidential race. And at Manchester’s WMUR, Cameron is the gatekeeper, the man who introduces the candidates to the voters. Those who want to be president come to him.

“When Carl Cameron calls for an interview, he’s usually put at the top of the list,” says James C. Courtovich, Gramm’s senior advisor in New Hampshire. “For the few months before the primary, he’s one of the most important reporters in the country.”

And though you probably haven’t even seen him on air, you likely will soon. Some of his political reports have already appeared on Fox Network News broadcasts in selected television markets. And after the New Hampshire vote, he’ll take a sabbatical from WMUR and join Fox as a campaign correspondent.

“One of the reasons he’s so fun to work with . . . is that Bob Dole comes over and says, ‘Carl, how ya doing?’ Gramm, and [Sen. Richard G.] Lugar, [former Tennessee Gov. Lamar] Alexander, all of them, it’s their business to get to know him as well as they do,” says Suzie Shuster, political unit manager at Fox Network News in New York.

It wasn’t always that way. In the 1980s, Cameron was a sales consultant for chemical and telecommunications companies--and a Deadhead on the side. A proud Cameron says he followed the venerable Grateful Dead rock ‘n’ roll band to 172 concerts before getting off the circuit six years ago.

Lead singer Jerry Garcia’s death in August led to “a miserable autumn,” Cameron says. “The day Jerry died, I did the obituary. I was on the Internet until very late at night. It was a rough one.”

In the late 1980s, Cameron was sales manager of a Manchester radio station when the brass decided that his voice was good enough to qualify him for a job reading on-air weather reports. He switched over to news soon thereafter, and covered the 1988 and 1992 presidential primaries for sister radio stations WZID and WFEA. He made the jump to television’s WMUR three years ago and began focusing on the current presidential race hours after the votes had been counted in November 1992.

Today he is the man of the hour in the Granite State, where running for president means engaging in so-called “retail politics,” shaking hands--and looking like you like it--everywhere from the Hanover Inn near the Vermont border, to the troubled mill town of Berlin on the way to Canada, and all the way down to doughnut shops in Derry, not too far from the Massachusetts line.

“Cameron is sort of a good symbol of the New Hampshire primary,” says Charlie Arlinghaus, executive director of the New Hampshire Republican State Committee. “Because it’s one of the last places where retail politics are practiced on a presidential level, citizens have an extraordinary access [to candidates]. Cameron has that same access, and it’s different from much of the rest of the country. . . . The candidates will call Carl at home.”

In September, before the race has heated up, Cameron’s asking softball questions of the Republican candidates as they trickle through the WMUR studio for taped interviews about “Why They Want to Be President.”

Cameron: “Who’s your political role model?” Buchanan: “My mentor in American politics is Richard Nixon. He was like a father to me, a teacher.”

Three months later, there’s Cameron again, with his edges sharpened, tripping up publishing magnate Steve Forbes in Forbes’ first on-camera blunder.

While filing for the New Hampshire primary, Forbes told Cameron he had not signed a pledge issued by the Iowa GOP asking candidates to eschew campaigning in Louisiana because the state had the audacity to schedule caucuses in front of both the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 12 and the New Hampshire vote eight days later.

As Forbes headed off to a speech, Cameron called Iowa and got a copy of the pledge Forbes signed there. “The first four lines specifically said that the signees would not campaign or seek support in any state that didn’t give New Hampshire or Iowa” their head start in the primary derby, Cameron said.

After the speech, Cameron handed the pledge to Forbes, the cameraman flipped on the camera, and Forbes told New Hampshire, “That’s not my signature.”

Forbes’ aide Bill Dal Col took a peek and said, “Yeah, this is the one we signed.”

“He was flustered,” Cameron recounts. “That was Forbes’ first misstep publicly in New Hampshire.”

And the incident was played over and over on WMUR, which offers its 120,000 viewers nine daily half-hour news shows seven days a week.

“Twelve to 16 years ago, WMUR was the station of Uncle Gus,” says Arlinghaus. “He was a children’s show host who also did the weather. . . . Now more people in New Hampshire watch [WMUR] for the news than watch the three Boston stations combined. There are more people watching the news than there are copies of the [Manchester] Union Leader sold.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

The Players

A periodic look at the behind-the-scenes aides, consultants, media members and others shaping the course of the 1996 presidential campaign.

Carl Cameron

Age: 34

Personal: Married to Pauline. Sons Kyle, 5 and Ryan, 14 months.

Background: Born in Massachussets; masters degree in buisness administration Boston University. Was sales manager at a Manchester radio station when he was tapped to read the weather reports. Moved on to politics and joined WMUR in 1992.

Downtime: Playing with the kids and pounding on the piano. A self-described reformed Deadhead, he stopped going to Grateful Dead concerts after seeing 172 of them. Formerly an active volunteer in a cooperative of alcohol and drug abuse programs in New Hampshire, but gave that up due to the demands of his job and family.

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“When Carl Cameron calls for an interview, he’s usually put at the top of the list. For the few months before the [New Hampshire] primary, he’s one of the most important reporters in the country.”

--James C. Courtovich, aide to Republican presidential candidate Phil Gramm.