Inside three weeks to Iowa's caucus and four to New Hampshire's crucial verdict, the biggest surprise in the most important month of campaigning is the virtual absence of campaign nastiness.
There has been none of what the Brits call ''a slanging match,'' when opponents castigate each other and the ears of onlookers with intemperate, vitriolic, insulting language. What explains this outbreak of etiquette?
The voters have signaled through polling, focus groups, interviews, and the ''feel'' veteran campaigners accumulate on the ground that they won't put up with the ''politics of personal destruction'' visited upon us by the Washington establishment in recent years.
This is reform from the bottom up. It's my lava theory in action: The real shifts in political behavior occur when a seismic shift in the electorate dictates changes to the politicians who would rule us. The voters, at least in New Hampshire, put out the word they wanted a higher-toned debate than the pond scum that surfaced from the wrangling of the Clinton impeachment trial and a bitterly divided and dysfunctional Congress.
He who goes negative in New Hampshire can expect an avalanche of criticism from the media, the academics, the spin artists of other campaigns, but most tellingly from voters. And in the lopsidedly front-loaded primary schedule, where 12 states apportion a mother lode of delegates on March 12, there is much less time to recover from the damage a self-inflicted negative attack can have on an imperiled candidacy.
Look at the TV advertising buys keyed to New Hampshire by the five candidates with money. To this point the money is going for uplifting stuff, minibiographicals, and issues plug-ins. There may be an eleventh-hour eruption of negative campaigning, but the difference between this campaign and the last one is this: The fear of going negative is greater than the temptation to take a rival down a peg. Everyone suspects the Steve Forbes campaign of being the one most likely to hurl mud. He did it last time. Forbes's fourth-quarter torrent of negative TV spots four years ago targeted the hapless Bob Dole and the surging Lamar Alexander.
But as so often happens with negative ads, the flurry damages not only the target(s) but the tosser. The beneficiary in 1996 was Pat Buchanan, a man to whom negative campaigning is normally meat and drink. But Pat had no money to do negative TV on his own, and he was riding a populist wave. This year he is a marginalized figure, not even a factor in New Hampshire as he wrestles for the levers of the Reform Party.
The big spenders on TV for New Hampshire, which includes outlays on Boston stations that beam north but don't get counted against the Granite State spending cap, are Bill Bradley and George W. Bush. Bradley's surprisingly well-heeled campaign bought $1.6 million worth for just the six weeks ending Dec. 20, in a Globe survey, while Bush shelled out nearly $1.2 million in the same time frame. Vice President Gore's cash-strapped effort was outspent, 2-1, by Bradley in the same six weeks, as was Senator John McCain by Bush.
Forbes, surprisingly, bought zero Boston tube time for the period, and spent less than a quarter-million on Manchester outlets, which leads some to suspect that he is going to spend a blockbuster amount late in the game.
The temptation to go negative tends to be overwhelming in the late stages of a closely fought campaign. Who can forget Bob Dole snarling to Tom Brokaw about George Bush the night Bush edged Dole in New Hampshire '88: ''Tell him to stop lying about my record.'' That year, Dole's victory in the Iowa caucuses gave him the lead in New Hampshire, till then-Governor John Sununu blackjacked WMUR-TV into taking a last-weekend TV spot castigating Dole, and that shifted the outcome.
Those who remember Bush Senior's spots against Michael Dukakis in '88, the Willie Horton ad and other low blows, take with a grain of salt the claims of the current Bush campaign that it will refrain from below-the-belt tactics.
But the dynamics of New Hampshire this time seem to militate against last-minute fang-and-claw attacks. Both races are close, possibly within the margin of polling error. The New Hampshire poll numbers for mid-to-late December had both races within 3 percentage points, with McCain leading Bush, 36-33, and Bradley edging Gore, 42-39.
Given those virtual dead heats, an over-eager candidate or campaign handler could spill the wind out of his own man's sails by a hasty lunge for the gutter. As a result, we get these stilted debate performances, with everyone afraid to make the big gaffe. We get Alfonse-Gaston routines from Bush and McCain, whose compliments to each other are a daily staple of life on the trail.
Gore and Bradley are more pointed in their criticisms of each other, and the pair have flogged each other's health care policies. But we have yet to come anywhere near the ''why, you dirty rat'' fare of other years.
Keep your fingers crossed that this Mr. Nice Guy stuff lasts.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
