MINNEAPOLIS`For me, it was liberating,'' says the only person alive who has been through what George W. Bush is going through.
Sixteen years after a maverick named Gary Hart rattled the foundation of Walter Mondale's front-runnership, the man who survived a New Hampshire earthquake says the memories are not of fury or panic but of a huge burden being lifted.
''It really was an enormous relief,'' he says today, deservedly secure in his reputation not simply as the guy buried in Ronald Reagan's 49-state landlside reelection in 1984, but as a distinguished public servant whose decency and integrity remain his defining characteristics.
''I had a lot of regrets about what I had wasted in all those months leading up to the New Hampshire election,'' Mondale recalled last week. ''But there were no regrets at all about suddenly facing odds that were a good deal less than 50-50.''
No parallel is exact, but 1984-2000 comes close. But Mondale as the true Comeback Kid is more understanding. He makes two important points:
The first occasion when voters nationally allow a result in one state to influence their attitudes is not the Iowa caucuses but the New Hampshire primary.
''It happened to me much faster than it's happened to Bush,'' Mondale said, ''but the basic point is that the primary might as well be occurring in living rooms all over the country. People really don't know the candidates at this point, and they really pay attention to what the verdict in New Hampshire has been. In my case, I had 40-point leads over Hart all over the country that disappeared almost overnight; it's been slower in Bush's case, but it is the same process at work.''
Bush has tried denial: New Hampshire is quirky; too many independents clouding the picture; he's still in command nationally. The fact is he's no better than 50-50 going into the final days of the pivotal campaign in South Carolina.
Mondale behaved totally differently. I remember interviewing him the day after the New Hampshire primary on the way to Georgia, listening as he minced no words in recognizing what had just happened. The day after that, he called in a bunch of us who were covering his campaign to announce the end of his front-runner status, to say the message from New Hampshire was national and that he had heard it.
Knocking a presumed nominee off his high horse is fun, if only for the chaotic, anarchic mess it produces. But there is also genuine curiosity about how the former front-runner will respond to the sudden onset of candidacy-threatening adversity.
''The sense I had right off the bat,'' Mondale said, ''is that people want to see a kind of vulnerability in a politician, the kind where his dependence on the voters is clear, where none of the trappings of protection really work. I don't think at this point that Bush is showing any of that.''
Far from it. The Bush response has been very much like his father's response to severe embarrassment in the Iowa caucuses in 1988 at the hands of Pat Robertson and Bob Dole: Get the knives and party steamroller out.
Bush's father won in New Hampshire after his Iowa fiasco essentially by cheating. He really did lie about Bob Dole's record, claiming he was some kind of wild Washingtonian tax-increaser. And he used a muscular local supporter, then-governor John Sununu, to get a late attack advertisement onto New Hampshire television over the final weekend when Dole had no opportunity to respond.
Those tactics, however, occurred in the aftermath of Iowa, toward which the country has a more nuanced, ambivalent reaction precisely because it is an event built around organized meetings of party activists. They worked in New Hampshire, where there is no respect at all for Iowa's winners, whereupon Dole's campaign fell apart nationally.
If Mondale's analysis is correct, Bush's son is playing with fire by treating his quite different New Hampshire experience as an aberration instead of as a wakeup call.
Mondale eventually prevailed over Hart because he recognized the challenge his candidacy posed and because he had 20 years of involvement in national affairs to draw on as he fought back.
The contrast today is stark. Bush is denying anything more than token legitimacy to John McCain's insurgency, and without a personal reservoir of support to draw on, he is betting that his institutional backing can crush the challenger for him. He may be right, but Bush has no safety net under him if he's wrong.
Thomas Oliphant is a Globe columnist.
