THE RESCUE BRIGADE

By Michael Kramer

NEW HAMPSHIRE IS WHERE THE TROUBLE IS SUPPOSED TO STOP, the place where Bob Dole vanquishes Steve Forbes and saves his campaign. That's the theory. In fact, Dole's longtime lead in the New Hampshire polls is disappearing faster than ice on a stove. Dole was ahead by about 20 percentage points two months ago. Today the trend is downward toward the category he dreads: too close to call.

When you're losing support that rapidly, building a fire wall against further damage is difficult. Yet that's what the Dole forces are attempting in New Hampshire. The counterattack is everywhere--on the ground and in the air. Dole's refusal to slam his rivals is history. Anti-Forbes TV spots are flooding the airwaves. A new one will remind voters that Forbes' flat-tax plan would end their cherished property-tax deduction. Encouraged by Dole staffers, special-interest groups have pitched in with statements like the one from a realtors' group equating the flat tax to a "bad apple pie. It looks good until you eat it."

For his ultimate salvation, though, Dole is counting on old-fashioned retail politics. He had 21,000 publicly committed supporters a year ago. Hard work has swelled that number to about 50,000. "You do it by making it personal," explains Jim Murphy, a senior Dole aide. "You get the people you've already got to ask others to support Dole as a favor to them."

Do the math and there shouldn't be a problem, right? If, in a multicandidate field, Dole has 50,000 votes in his pocket and the eventual turnout is no more than about 160,000, why worry? For two reasons. First, independents can vote Republican in New Hampshire and could account for 20% of the total. Forbes, everyone agrees, would win most of those ballots. Dole's other problem is intensity. So far, there isn't any. It's great to have 50,000 names on paper, but if those folks don't vote, so what? "Energizing people is hard," says state senator George Lovejoy, a Dole supporter."It's more exciting to be with an insurgent like Forbes." There's also "a sense that Dole is carrying too much Washington baggage to change things," says Joe Johnston, Dole's co-chair in Hancock. "And people can't see how reducing the deficit is good for them. He's coming across as just a head chopper."

Against such pessimism,the Dole high command presses on. "But most of us," says Walter Morse, "have been too busy with our real jobs to do much." Morse is more than a bit player. He is the sheriff of Hillsborough, New Hampshire's most populous county. "The sheriffs are key," Dole told me last summer. "They're the major grass-roots force in the state." Unfortunately for Dole, the other sheriffs echo Morse. "We'll get the signs up," says Sheriff Wayne Vetter of Rockingham County. "But it's tough. Forbes should have peaked by now. He hasn't."

New Hampshirites are accustomed to surprising themselves. Representative Charles Bass, a Dole supporter, is the son of the man who created the modern New Hampshire primary in 1952. "It was done to stop Bob Taft with Ike," says Bass. "From then, we've seen how someone can come from nowhere and win here in the last three weeks." For Bass and his fellow Dole backers, the task is to keep a man from nowhere from going somewhere. No one will take a bet.