ORTSMOUTH, N.H. - It's too soon to relax, folks, but you can see the light at the end of the tunnel: The presidential campaign will be over a year from Tuesday.
Halloween is always the appropriate signpost launching the gun lap for the presidency.The ghosts and goblins of campaigns past crop up like conifers in the Granite State. Quarrying for building stone declined as an industry with the mixing of concrete, but quarrying for primary votes is an industry all in itself. Gulling the visitors, candidates, and all their camp followers, as well as feeding, watering, and roofing them, is not a cottage industry, but a full-blown, rip-roaring tourist industry.
If you build it, concluded the architects of New Hampshire's first primary, they will come - and pay through the nose for the privilege. We're indebted to Thursday's New York Times for gossipy detail about the $54 million of his own dough lavished on Steve Forbes's presidential ambition since 1996.
Forbes has taken the rubber band off his magazine publishing bankroll to the tune of $19 million this year already. His television ads come on here more frequently than the weather or the lottery number. Since his net worth is pegged at $440 million, he can dig even deeper. In the '96 primary, he dumped a ton of boodle on negative ads castigating Bob Dole. That, plus the Union Leader's lusty embrace, gave Pat Buchanan the GOP victory here.
For his troubles - some estimate Steve poured $3 million into or around New Hampshire last time - the Forbes lad got 25,505 votes in the Republican primary. Let's say this time, for argument's sake, his outlay is closer to $5 million in and around New Hampshire (e.g., commercial roadblocks and saturation ratings points on costly Boston TV).
And let's say Steve doubles his total vote from last time, say to 50,000. That would still be only around 20 percent of the probable turnout, a showing two or three times greater than what he registers in polls today. If Steve snags 50,000 votes for his $5 million outlay hereabouts, that's $100 per vote. You might think that's high. You might think a canny New Hampshire cynic might just wonder, ''Hmm. If I promise to vote for Steve, would he just give me the C-note?''
I happen to think the vast majority of people would not sell their vote for $100, or twice that. Now, three times that, I begin to wonder. That's a car payment, after all. But $100 a vote is a bargain price to what Steve dropped in the Ames, Iowa, straw poll this summer. There he had to shell out $300 a vote.
But Steve is not going to be president no matter if he spends $1,000 a vote. Do you remember when the Nixon crowd dumped all over George McGovern in the 1972 campaign? Because George had an income-redistribution scheme that would have given every American an extra $1,000 in some complicated fashion? Why was McGovern a laughingstock for that but Forbes is treated seriously?
Beats me. I know there is too much Big Money sluicing through the sewers of politics, turning Washington into a septic tank. But we are not auctioning off the White House to the highest bidder - yet. Ross Perot tried it twice. For his $64 million, Ross got a lot of air time, some votes, and his footnote in history.
Not even the most pro-business Republican with any gravitas believes deep down that a Steve Forbes could win a national election, and it is hard to see a place for him anywhere near the ticket. So one year from Tuesday, a president will be elected by the name of Bush, Gore, Bradley, or McCain.
Vice President Al Gore and Bill Bradley had their hour in the artificial sun of klieg lights Wednesday in Hanover, and McCain, Forbes, and three also-ran Republicans did their thing the next night. Texas Governor George W. Bush skipped out, as is the front-runner's privilege, with a lame excuse about needing to be in Dallas for some ceremony involving his wife.
That was the last big event Bush can skip up here without paying a price. George Dubbbayew just used up his final get-out-of-jail card as he tries to play Granite State Monopoly. Because just as New Hampshire is not ready to fork over its troth to the richest suitor, neither is it ready to roll over for an inexperienced national politician who takes the state for granite, e r, granted.
The GOP dropout list is long: Elizabeth Dole, Dan Quayle, Lamar Alexander - after Bush's lead froze their money supply - each quit the race. Buchanan and US Senator Bob Smith quit the party. Smith's slithering back toward Republican ranks in the wake of John Chafee's death, so as to cop Chafee's chairmanship of the Senate committee on the environment, is one of the more oafishly cynical and crass moves we've seen in a long time. Senator Orrin Hatch, abortion foe Gary Bauer, and Alan Keyes, a crank who has blended the decibel level of the talk-show circus with the fevered political notions of a sidewalk haranguer, are not factors, though they got the same air time in Hanover (''Hangover, N.H.'' in the words of one wag) as did McCain and Forbes.
At week's end, we can say this: Bradley is serious, articulate, thematic; Gore is energized and, of necessity, much more aggressive than he has been; McCain is the principal mainstream alternative to Bush, who may have trouble handling the pressure of confrontations. And Forbes has the potential to detonate a nuclear attack of negative advertising upon the head of George Dubbayew, the reluctant warrior.
Cui bono?, as the Jesuits say. Who benefits from a megaton of Forbes ads savaging Bush? McCain, probably. The Arizonan is the hero not only of the Hanoi Hilton and the Vietnam War but of the campaign finance scandal and the Big Money War. I also think he may win the third primary in New Hampshire, the one between McCain and Bradley for the independent voters, those unenrolled in either party, who'll decide late which race they want to affect.
If McCain continues to emerge as the honest Old Soldier chasing the moneychangers from the temple of government, he may draw enough independents off Bradley to enable Gore to prevail. Hey, it's a theory.
David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.
