Displaying Flair for the Dramatic

“I paid for this microphone, Mr. Breen,” the candidate said. And with that adamant line to his host 20 years ago at the start of a contentious debate here, Ronald Reagan nailed down his victory in the New Hampshire primary and set his course toward the White House.

The New Hampshire primary has a history of producing such moments of drama. Slipping out spontaneously or perhaps deliberately, sometimes in the closing hours or days, or even after the votes are counted, they define the candidates and shape the course of the presidential race.

But first, a quiz:

In 1968, Sen. Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota challenged the incumbent, and particularly powerful, Lyndon B. Johnson for the Democratic presidential nomination. Who won?

If you think back to Johnson’s decision 19 days later to drop out of the race and you say McCarthy won, you are . . . wrong. Johnson, a write-in candidate, finished with 48%, McCarthy with 42%.

But a second-place finish against an incumbent president was sufficient to imbue McCarthy with the aura of a winner.

That’s what seems to happen in New Hampshire: In 1980, it was a single moment that crystallized the contest; in 1968, it was the campaign leading up to New Hampshire that produced a stunning result.

Why New Hampshire?

All New Hampshire Is a Stage

John B. Anderson, chairman of the history department at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Mass. (not the politician by the same name who sought the presidency in 1980), likes to equate the New Hampshire primary to the tryout of a show aiming for Broadway: The candidates are the cast, the voters, the audience and the press play the role of the critics.

They all come together to play out their drama in a small state; indeed the stage, largely a triangle formed by Nashua, Concord and Portsmouth, where the state’s population is concentrated, covers no more territory than a similar triangle marked by Santa Monica, Newport Beach and Pomona.

So, Anderson said, the state offers a unique political intimacy. It allows what might, on a grander stage, be an inconsequential remark to grow in magnitude and take on a life of its own--drawn out, perhaps, by a less-than-10% candidate acting as something of a provocateur.

Onto that stage in 1980 strolled Reagan and George “Big Mo” Bush, with Bush claiming momentum from his victory in the just-concluded Iowa caucuses.

Seeking a one-on-one showdown with Reagan, he tried to keep the less-popular candidates out of a debate.

Reagan’s Remark Aids His Candidacy

During a contentious moment over who should be included in the debate, Reagan made his crack about the microphone, providing a commanding sound bite, and left Bush squirming and embarrassed.

“People perceived that he was just an actor,” Anderson said of Reagan. “The spontaneity of the remark showed a willingness to rise to the occasion, a quickness of wit.”

In 1984, New Hampshire provided a stunning turn in the Democratic presidential contest when Gary Hart, a little-known senator from Colorado, upset the front-runner and former vice president, Walter Mondale. Although Mondale went on to win the nomination, Hart was the focus of press attention in New Hampshire. One of the most memorable moments came when Hart joined in a lumberjack competition and scored a bull’s-eye in the ax throwing event.

Eight years ago, Bill Clinton was staggering from the allegations of an extramarital affair with a nightclub entertainer named Gennifer Flowers and from revelations of his efforts to avoid the military draft. It was in New Hampshire, when his campaign was at its lowest, that he found the wherewithal to fight back.

“Let me tell you: They tell me I’m on the ropes . . . because other people have questioned my life after years of public service,” Clinton said to a crowd at an Elks Club in Dover. “You give me this election and I won’t be like George Bush and forget you. I’ll be with you until the last dog dies.”

It was a stirring moment, portraying a candidate who truly was on the ropes--and, in retrospect, it only made it easier for him to claim on election night that he was the “comeback kid.” Never mind that, in fact, he came in second in New Hampshire to Paul E. Tsongas.

Clinton maneuvered himself onto network telecasts even before Tsongas could claim victory; having in effect declared himself that he had been on the ropes, he could now drape the flag of victory around his second-place shoulders.

New Hampshire too, produced one of the most famous modern political photographs: Edmund S. Muskie, the senator from Maine, tearfully responding in 1972 to a distressing news article that he thought reflected poorly on his wife, Jane.

“Muskie crying--that surely was one of the defining events of that campaign,” said Robert D. Loevy, a political science professor at Colorado College who has written two books on New Hampshire primaries.

“With so much of the press present, those campaign-defining photographs often get taken in New Hampshire,” Loevy said.

So what has happened this year?

Perhaps nothing on a par with Reagan’s claim to the microphone. But consider a little-noticed occurrence last week, when the two Democratic combatants found themselves faced with the only significant snowfall of the campaign.

Bill Bradley spent much of his morning schmoozing in the lobby of his hotel; Al Gore took to the streets, bringing coffee and doughnuts to snowplow crews.

Not the stuff of high drama. But even then there was precedent.

In 1988, a monster storm played havoc with campaign schedules.

Bob Dole, seeking the Republican presidential nomination, hung back at his hotel, chafing at the restrictions imposed by the blizzard.

His opponent, a vice president whose campaign had, like Gore’s, gotten off to a rocky start, tried something else.

He had already ditched many of the symbols of his office; he was campaigning in lumberyards and truck stops, and had developed such an affinity for clambering aboard earthmoving equipment that he became known as the candidate who would campaign aboard anything that was large, yellow and made loud noises.

So when the storm struck, out he went to the nearest snowplows, making the best of a bad situation. That candidate was George Bush, creating his own defining moment in New Hampshire.