N ROUTE 101, N.H. - Amidships on his campaign bus, during a recent swing through the first-primary state, Senator John McCain was conducting what aides call the press conference that never ends.
Talking casually, on the record, with a ceaseless stream of reporters and editorialists, the Arizona Republican sympathized with the Rwandans, poked fun at the French, and returned relentlessly to his mantra: for campaign finance reform. Against special interests.
Squeezed into a back corner of the bus, media strategist Mike Murphy - who offers a three-word summary of campaign strategy (''offense, offense, offense'') - plugged a wireless modem into the side of his laptop computer and tried to distract himself with e-mail.
''My handler instincts are to be all over this,'' Murphy said, looking toward the prolonged, uncontrolled contact between candidate and media. ''Every time I see ... the pens whip out, my adrenalin kind of runs up a little. I've got to Zen away from it.''
Murphy is hardly alone: There's a lot of Zen in the art of candidate maintenance in New Hampshire these days.
In a campaign dominated so far by the rising tide of support for McCain and Bill Bradley, and by voter demands for ''authenticity'' in candidates, the traditional tools of political tradecraft - message management, polling, attack advertising, and the like - have been relegated to the back of the bus, if they are spoken of at all.
This tonal shift has been particularly noticeable on the airwaves. As of mid-December, the candidates had already poured more than $4 million into over 1,000 minutes of television commercials for New Hampshire's Feb. 1 elections. Yet it has been an air war - so far - in which hardly a punch has been thrown. Instead the TV viewers in New Hampshire have been blitzed with family-oriented ads featuring the contenders' personal histories, their wives and children, and with high-toned spots focused on candidates' favored issues. So determinedly uncontroversial have the ad campaigns been that when the occasional harsh spot runs - generally sponsored by third party groups and not rival campaigns - it is news. And when Al Gore, during a December debate, sought to win Bill Bradley's handshake on a TV ad ban, Bradley felt free to treat the offer as a faintly ridiculous and unnecessary step.
After all, who would even think of running a slashing negative ad? Not Gore or Bradley. Or so they say now.
''Right now, these guys are all holding back, and you have this really unusual phenomenon of a heavy dominance of feel-good advertising, aimed at pulling your heartstrings rather than playing to your anger,'' said Tobe Berkovitz, professional media-buyer who teaches a course in political advertising at Boston University. ''We haven't seen a lot of this sort of advertising for 10 years. ... The attacks are quite veiled.''
While there is broad agreement that the public is hungry for authenticity and averse to negative campaigning, there is no consensus as to why. Some say it is a reaction against President Clinton's smooth handling of the media and public opinion, others that the citizenry has simply gotten disgusted with nasty contests.
Murphy, a key strategist for the victorious campaigns of New Jersey Governor Christine Todd Whitman and Michigan Governor John Engler, and for the near-miss senatorial campaign of Oliver North, might seem a fish out of water in this environment. So too Robert Shrum and other partisans for Vice President Al Gore. They have launched some attacks, but have not come close to using what Berkovitz indelicately calls their ''ability and inclination to rip the eyes out of Bill Bradley's head with television advertising.''
Still, notwithstanding candidates' efforts to appear unscripted and unpackaged, there is plenty of evidence of message management about - even an ''unscripted'' campaign, after all, must be carefully planned.
McCain, for example, was pushing for campaign finance reform to reduce the role of special, monied interests in politics long before the campaign began. But observers say he has ''tweaked'' his message since the campaign began, improving his pitch without altering his position.
''McCain had a plan and message, and he has stuck to it,'' says Mark Mellman, a Democratic pollster. ''But when he started out, he was talking about procedures for campaign finance reform ... and people's eyes glazed over. Now he has a pattern in his speeches and his responses to questions: He talks about the problem'' he is asked about, whether it is health care, education, or defense spending, ''he talks about what he wants to do about it, then he talks about why that can't be done without breaking the grip of special interests.''
McCain has also proved something of an artist at exploiting two of the most valuable commodities in campaign communication: great one-liners and repetition. Repeating the same thing over and over in live appearances can make the candidate seem insubstantial - witness the recent struggles of most overtly scripted major candidate, Republican national front-runner George W. Bush - but establishing a pattern as McCain has done can achieve a desired result.
Similarly, how much repetition of paid advertising works best is a vital calculation for campaign strategists, because television advertising is both essential and enormously expensive. The pros are constantly recalibrating how viewers receive and assimilate the message.
The era when people sat in front of the television and watched in a concentrated way are long gone, but what it takes to drive home a message or an image in an age of rapidly proliferating information sources is still evolving.
Four years ago, for example, there was broad agreement that a viewer had to be exposed to an advertising message a minimum of five times for it to sink in, and that after 10 viewings there was a risk of overexposure. This year, said Mark McKinnon, whose Maverick Media company is making Texas Governor Bush's commercials, ''with the clutter of information people are seeing, 7.5 to 12.5 is the range'' of exposures the campaign seeks.
''Especially in a presidential election, a campaign requires a full constellation of speeches, ads, and free press,'' McKinnon said, but ''in a sense, everything else is wind in the sails of the boat and advertising is the rudder. It supplies specificity and direction.''
The campaigns differ significantly over how to deliver the media message, and the differences have everything to do with whether the competing camps are using gut or scientific political methods.
For example, McCain relies heavily on 60-second commercials, while the rest of the candidates rely more on 30-second spots. The campaign of Republican publisher Steve Forbes has talked with some media outlets about 15- or even 10-second spots.
Forbes campaign manager Bill Dal Col said he would not use 60-second spots even if he had the money to do so, because focus groups and research show that ''in a 60, the eyes glaze over. Really, around the 20, 25 second mark, you start to see their dials go flat.''
Greg Stevens, who makes McCain's ads, and Murphy, who strategizes with him on how to use them, disdain this approach, asserting that such calculations must be based on the quality of material ad makers have to work with. They think McCain's spot holds viewers' attention because, Stevens said, ''with any product, and candidate what you look for is the USP,'' a unique selling point, and they believe they have found that in the Arizona senator's war-hero-turned-political-reformer story.
Even though McCain and Bradley both have been professional politicians for many years, the current public hunger for authenticity gives them a marketing edge, because each achieved renown before entering politics, McCain as a Vietnam prisoner of war and Bradley as an Olympic athlete and professional basketball star.
Bush and Gore, both born into political families, cannot compete as easily on that ground, and a broad assortment of political professionals, both inside and outside the various campaigns, suggest the establishment candidates have had to respond by shifting the focus.
Up front, this has translated into the first ''strengthen our military'' commercial of the campaign, a Bush effort to embrace a traditionally Republican issue in simpler, more emotional terms than McCain, and the first environmental ad, a Gore attempt to capture similarly a traditionally Democratic issue on which Bradley has not focused much of his campaign energies yet.
Still, the comparatively gentlemanly start notwithstanding, it is considered unlikely this will be an attack-ad-free campaign. Mellman said that stage ''usually ... starts after the candidates are better known. Nobody wants to be known as the guy who went negative, so they wait until their images are more filled out. Secondly, it comes out when people get a little more desperate.''
While it is too early for desparation regarding the New Hampshire primary, the campaign has heated up early on the small screen. Bradley, in particular, has unleashed an enormous television advertising blitz.
In the four-week period beginning Nov. 23, the Bradley campaign has bought 455 minutes of advertising time, worth over $1.3 million, according to figures kept by the TV stations. Gore has spent $312,500 for 122 minutes.
''Being on the air now is very important for us,'' said former Massachusetts attorney general Jim Shannon, a co-chairman of Bradley's Massachusetts organization, because as Gore stepped up his criticisms ''the need for a more aggressive response became apparent.''
Whatever else might be said about advertising's significance, there is no doubt that its expense has profoundly altered other elements of marketing the candidates.
''There are no bumper stickers, no yard signs'' being given away in most campaign offices this year, Shannon says. ''If you want one, you go on the Internet and buy one. The campaigns license their logos and get a royalty.
''Given a choice between bumper stickers and more television advertising, it's not close,'' he says. ''The effect is cumulative. Over time, through television, people get a feel.''
