HILADELPHIA - Forces of the victor and the vanquished from last winter's New Hampshire Republican primary joined hands Friday to repel the initial attempt to dislodge the Granite State from its pole position.
New Hampshire's primary primacy survived opening challenges to its strategic location at the front of the primary schedule in a meeting of the Convention Rules Committee. ''My guess is that it will remain the status quo,'' said GOP national committeeman Tom Rath, a Concord lawyer and veteran of repeated skirmishes over New Hampshire's way-out-of-proportion influence on the nominating processes of the big parties.
What was known as ''the Delaware plan'' was beaten back by delegates from the larger states, with the active encouragement of Rath and New Hampshire GOP chairman Steve Duprey. But there remained a chance that over the weekend, states that want to rejigger the schedule might succeed in winning enough votes to force a floor fight at tomorrow's opening afternoon session. ''We live to fight another day,'' said Rath at midday Friday. ''But until we have that vote, I'm not relieved.''
Another approach, under the label of ''flexibility,'' would give the GOP National Committee the right to modify the primary schedule in terms of what Haley Barbour of Mississippi called ''time and sequence.'' Barbour, a former GOP national chairman, said that when it comes to scheduling presidential primaries, ''any solution has to be bipartisan,'' because state Republican parties could not afford to pay for primary elections in states where Democrats control the legislature.
For the moment, said Rath, New Hampshire remains number one.
''I think we need a change - but I don't know what,'' said a Massachusetts delegate on the Rules Committee, Madeleine Gelsinon of Sudbury. An elected member of the Massachusetts GOP State Committee, she became a convention delegate by virtue of aligning with the insurgent candidacy of US Senator John McCain, who gobbled up George W. Bush in the Bay State after winning New Hampshire by 20 points.
There was a joint front Friday with the McCain elements joining the Bush campaign in rebuffing attempts to change the primary system to diminish New Hampshire's pivotal role. Gelsinon said the McCain chain of command passed word to her that ''they want to keep it status quo.''
Delegates backing alternatives such as the Delaware plan - and others intended to seduce the support of big states that vote after New Hampshire, but find their influence dwarfed by their tiny predecessor's - faced off in a meeting room several miles from the convention hall itself.
Gelsinon, fitness director at the Norumbega Point retirement community in Weston, mother of three, and wife of an oral surgeon, is attending her third convention. She is a pro-life Republican whose father was White House correspondent for a Roman Catholic news service; a onetime Pat Buchanan supporter, she broke with him over trade, and now is a McCainiac for Bush.
She had responded to a letter from McCain asking her to be a delegate, and she made it when the Bush forces got swamped in the Northeast, losing every New England state but Maine. Those results seem reflected in the delegate seating arrangements inside the First Union Center. New Hampshire is way off in the back, and Vermont has an obstructed view, as remote as the District of Columbia's, whose Republicans have nary a prayer of delivering the capital's vote to Bush.
Reflecting her adopted New England perspective, Gelsinon, who grew up in Washington, said, ''New Hampshire definitely has got to be number one'' when primary season rolls around. Without New Hampshire's open access to dark-horse candidacies, its ease of travel, and receptivity to early and energetic candidacies, there would have been no upstart victories like those of Ronald Reagan in '80, George Bush the elder in '88, Buchanan in '96, and McCain this year.
Gelsinon backed Buchanan and McCain, and recognizes the threat to insurgent candidacies, which can sometimes reconstitute top-heavy or sclerotic party leadership, if New Hampshire's role is subsumed into a different primary scheduling scheme.
Morton Blackwell, a Virginia delegate, appeared hopping mad when he emerged from a morning rules panel session to tell reporters that the current system discriminates against bigger, more important states. ''It's rotten for our party, and rotten for our country,'' Blackwell spat.
New Hampshire is a humbler of front-runners; the list of big losers includes Reagan in '76 (barely beaten back by a weakened President Ford); Bush the elder in '80, defeated by ''I'm paying for this microphone ...''; Bob Dole in '88 (to Bush); and Bush again in '92 (when Buchanan got a scary 37 percent to reveal the president's weakness there).
But the Bush campaign, and the McCain camp that controls five of six New England delegations, agreed it would be unwise to try to dump New Hampshire now.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
