ANCHESTER, N.H. - When Senator John McCain first came to New Hampshire to campaign for the Republican nomination, he liked nothing more than to talk about foreign policy and campaign finance. But when he left, he was the self-declared candidate of fiscal responsibility, focusing on the need to spend trillions of dollars on Social Security and paying down the national debt.
Similarly, when Vice President Al Gore first started taking about his health care plan last summer, it almost seemed as if he wanted the proposal to be little-noticed, given the 1993 Clinton-Gore health care fiasco. But after Bill Bradley unveiled his health care plan, Gore suddenly rediscovered his own proposal and made it a centerpiece of his campaign.
In striking ways, the winners of Tuesday's New Hampshire primary remade themselves in the crucible of the campaign. If McCain and Gore become the nominees of their parties, they owe the shaping of their message partly to their challengers.
McCain, for example, ''became a much stronger candidate'' after he responded last month to George W. Bush's tax plan by focusing on Social Security and the debt, according to McCain's national cochairman, former New Hampshire Senator Warren Rudman. ''George Bush lost that tax debate.''
Indeed, the main question facing the Bush campaign is whether it was wise for the Texas governor to be so rigid in his campaign style. Rather than react to the changing shape of the campaign, Bush has said for months that he would repeat the same message until Election Day this November to give himself a mandate.
But the New Hampshire primary brought to light the hole in Bush's campaign strategy. Bush's game plan was based on his concern about the self-financed candidacy of Steve Forbes. The Bush brain trust, seeking to counter Forbes's proposal for a 17-percent flat tax, came up with an idea for a $483 billion tax cut. When Bush announced the proposal, he focused almost entirely on giving money back to taxpayers, and put little emphasis on how he would shore up Social Security. He included only one vague reference to reducing the national debt.
That provided an enormous opening for McCain, who paid little attention to tax cuts in the first months of his campaign. McCain's tax-cut plan is more modest than Bush's. But McCain, prodded by Rudman, began to focus on the seemingly dry topic of reducing the national debt. In addition, McCain talked about the need to use some of the surplus to shore up Social Security.
This, McCain often said, was the true ''conservative'' position.
As it turned out, McCain's focus on Social Security and the debt was more in tune with the views of Republicans than the Bush tax-cut plan, according to the polls. Over the last several weeks, McCain often sounded like another New Hampshire primary winner - the late Democratic Senator Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts, who cofounded the Concord Coalition with Rudman to focus attention on the deficit.
It was only in the last days of the campaign that Bush grudgingly reacted to McCain's focus on Social Security and the national debt by including a graphic in his television advertisements about the issues. But that may have served to remind viewers that McCain had a much bigger plan to deal with those matters.
Gore, meanwhile, hardly sounded like a candidate who would make health care a top priority when he formally announced his campaign last June. In a speech in his hometown of Carthage, Tenn., Gore merely said that ''families deserve decent, affordable health care,'' a vague goal that few could oppose. Gore was reluctant to propose a major government-financed health care plan because of the bitter memories of the way the Clinton health plan was killed in 1993. When Gore did announce a health policy in September, it focused mostly on providing children with health insurance and provided no road map for universal coverage.
''I think the experience of '93 ... led him to downplay the notion of universal coverage more than he needed to,'' said Dean Spiliotes, a professor of government at Dartmouth College. ''He was talking more about policy increments than sweeping programs.''
But when Bradley unveiled his plan for universal health care coverage and began pulling even with Gore in the polls, the vice president's campaign staff was forced to rethink the strategy. After weeks of indecision, Gore began criticizing Bradley's plan as overreaching, and talked more about his own proposal for children's health insurance. Through January, Gore sounded more like Bradley, saying that he intended eventually to ensure health insurance for all Americans - a far cry from his original position.
Gore now says the Bradley challenge has made him a better candidate. It helped ''put wind in my sails, and put my keel deeper in the water,'' Gore said in a recent interview.
Bradley, by contrast, seemed determined for months not to change his campaign strategy in response to the heightened Gore attacks. It was only in the last week of the campaign that Bradley said, ''I've had it,'' and began attacking Gore more directly.
