MANCHESTER, N.H. -- This is the meat grinder stage of the make-or-break New Hampshire primary.
The distant rumble of tanks and artillery draws near. It's show time. The final debates Wednesday night did nothing to alter the terrain over which the surviving campaigns must navigate. Best positioned to methodically deploy their core vote are Vice President Al Gore and Texas Governor George W. Bush, who have the preeminent armies in the field. Bill Bradley looked like no kind of Happy Warrior as he accused Gore of falsehood, distortion, selective record-reading.
Where has Bill been? This is how modern campaigns unfold. Bush has had a lot worse things said about him by his GOP rivals but managed to grin and quip and wink his way through 90 minutes of show and tell.
But the 2-1 pasting he took in Iowa, though predictable, seems to have taken some starch out of the old basketeer. His cardiac whirlies, the grind of travel, and the pesky needles broadcast from Camp Gore seem to nettle Bradley, a rookie on the presidential circuit. He needed a big turnaround performance, but the debate was a tractor pull. Which was all Gore needed.
Just keep the debate close, make no gaffes, and wait for the organization to take over. Tuesday is ''Let's Get Ready to Rumble'' day for the Gore operation. There's a list of 1,600 get-out-the-vote workers commanded by Bill Shaheen, the governor's husband. Experienced operatives from around the country have their assignments. Bradley is badly outgunned on the ground.
Dollar Bill tried to get tougher in the clinches. But he still has trouble pulling the trigger. The differences between Bradley and Gore are Byzantine. Al keeps biffing him along the ropes as Bill keeps looking wanly for the ref. The post-Iowa lift Bradley prayed for with his campaign finance reform pitch to New Hampshire's independent voters may not materialize. That's because John McCain's crusade on the GOP side seems to have taken hold, if crowd size, enthusiasm, and combativeness in the candidate are any gauge, and they typically are.
Bradley got 35 percent in Iowa to McCain's paltry 5 - but McCain is the rage here. Bush knows it; that's why he's careful not to slash ''my buddy.'' Bush shows surpisingly taut discipline in not knocking his popular rival.
Like Gore, Bush has a muscular home-grown political operation, thanks to Senator Judd Gregg. With his establishment edge even more pronounced than Gore's, Bush didn't have to win any debates, just not get cuffed around too badly. McCain's precarious lead in some polls is not supported by the same kind of trained infantry, for all the contagious enthusiasm of the McCain irregulars.
McCain had a good debate, capturing the second half, first by telling off Alan Keyes for his dippy antiabortion diatribe, then telling Bush to his chops that he, McCain, would be on more solid moral ground admonishing Gore over campaign finance scandals than Bush, the Poster Child for MegaBucks influence peddling. But Bush countered skillfully: He massaged his twin themes of tax cuts and state-centered education reform, which resonate with typical GOP voters here.
McCain's outsider act will play better with independents - who may not vote in heavy numbers.
Phlegmatic tycoon Steve Forbes looked almost presidential, standing next to Gary Bauer and Keyes, the Kharismatic Krank who ran an astonishing third in Iowa and stole Bauer's antiabortion thunder. Bauer, trying to claw his way back into parity in the lower tier, ordered Chinese. He did the Yellow Peril motif, luridly cited a ''disgusting act'' performed by the incumbent, and tossed Keyes into the mosh pit for a truly bizarre trifecta.
The irrepressible McCain had spent the day backpedaling from one of those zany ''what if'' questions that trigger a media feeding frenzy. Two years ago, he told me he'd love to run for president but worried what the inevitable loss of privacy would do to his wife and kids. I was two feet from him in the media pack dogging him at the Merrimack Restaurant at lunch hour. A TV guy barked questions about what if his 15-year old daughter got pregnant.
McCain's answers were not good enough for Mr. TV. So McCain leaned into the fellow's chops and asked menacingly: ''What is your problem, sir?'' before breaking off eye contact and moving on.
Cindy McCain, unblinking at her man's side, looked ashen. I got the distinct impression that if Mr. TV had braced McCain privately in a parking lot somewhere, those TV teeth would have been spread on the pavement like Chiclets.
That's politics for you. McCain spends five and a half years in the Hanoi Hilton having bamboo shoots shoved up his fingernails, in the honorable cause of defending America, so back home a rabble-rousing, talk-show tongue-twister can try to make a chump out of him and his daughter on national TV.
What a country. As McCain winks in his happier mode on the crusade, ''You gotta love it.'' He does. He proved it. That's why I'm for him.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
