MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Thank you, Iowa; now, please take a seat. You had your fling, it's over, and as you slip back into somnolence take solace knowing you get more bites at the political apple than most citizens elsewhere.
New Hampshire, the floor is yours: You decide if John McCain or Bill Bradley lives to fight another day.
The odds heavily favor George W. Bush and Al Gore, the front-runners everywhere else from day one. Only New Hampshire can keep a race going in either party. If Vice President Gore rolls up Bradley here as he just did in Iowa, the old basketball star can forget about the playoffs at the convention; he won't even last out the regular primary season.
Bradley's handlers promise he won't go down without a fight in New Hampshire. But losing the first two rounds would put Bradley in a coffin-shaped box heading into the 16 Democratic contests on March 7, topped by California and New York.
For all practical purposes, McCain and Bradley, the handshake twins who shook on campaign finance reform, will die in a New Hampshire snowbank unless they win here. Bradley's poll numbers have been slipping, and after the whipping he took in Iowa, as any skier knows, the slip may turn into a slide.
McCain has led here, not by much, in some recent polls, but his fate is in the hands of New Hampshire's independents. These notoriously fickle, late-deciding folks choose from the unenrolled menu, headlined McCain in Column A and Bradley in Column B. Off the Iowa results, who benefits? Probably McCain. He's a maverick in a state that has rewarded mavericks. His true-blue patriotism and compelling life story distinguish him. You could not ask any man to do more for his country than the fighter pilot who stood tall as a POW.
Not since the advent of the modern primary system a half-century back has Ye Olde Granite State been in position to exert such leverage on choosing the next Leader of the Galaxy. Like so much in politics, it wasn't really planned to work this way, it just sort of happened accidentally.
Some things happened in Iowa that were - let's be blunt - screwy. More than half of all Iowa's voting Republicans cast their presidential vote for men who had never been elected to any public office, not even dogcatcher.
Steve Forbes, Alan Keyes, and Gary Bauer, three men who never won any shard of power from their fellow citizens, combined for 53 percent. Forbes, who got an eyebrow-raising 30 percent for his megabucks investment, plowed millions into Iowa. Keyes, the single biggest surprise at 14 percent, ran a Velveeta-and-saltine campaign compared with Forbes's capitalist carpet-bombing.
Bauer's 9 percent managed to eclipse the 5 percent of Senator McCain, who merely staged a flyover for Iowa and hoarded his ammo, TV money, and candidate time for the New Hampshire push. Because this is the ballgame, for all intents and purposes. If McCain can't beat George W. Bush (a not overly impressive 41 percent in Iowa) here, then the Arizonan may as well raise the white flag. Same for Bradley, who got hammered by nearly 2-1 in Iowa. If Dollar Bill loses here next Tuesday, it's hard to construct any plausible scenario by which he cops the Democratic nomination. So New Hampshire looms as not only the gatekeeper to the primary season, but the time-keeper, and the saloon-keeper as well, tossing out all the revelers who are tapped out.
All the brawnier states with piles more delegates who tried to move up in the calendar to exert more influence have created a delegate selection system that is so front-loaded as to be extremely precarious. It's like a hay wagon piled 12 bales high, swaying dreadfully around the corners and over the bumps.
One rider who fell off in Iowa was Utah's Orrin Hatch (1 percent), the American Gothic senator out of the Grant Wood sketchbook. Hatch, as it happens, has personally won more elections over his career than Bush (twice elected governor), Forbes, Keyes, and Bauer combined. Same for McCain. But Iowa's Republicans, a self-selected and self-propelled slice of prairie conservativism, hold senators in low regard.
The Big Money Boys won in the Republican contest in Iowa. Bush and Forbes can buy any political service or tool or rent-a-crowd they need.
Bradley outspent Gore substantially in Iowa, and has a smaller edge here, but money is not the factor among Democrats as it is in the other race.
It's now up to New Hampshire to send a message against unlimited money and the influence of multimillionaires on our politics. If New Hampshire doesn't send that message, the way this cockeyed system is constructed, no other state can.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
