Politics: Long Hot Winter

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New Hampshire ranks 43rd in state population, commands four electoral votes out of 538, will have only eight 1,333 delegates to the Republican National Convention, and is too insulated and ingrown to offer any faithful reflection of an urban nation's moods and problems. Each leap year, however, the Granite State's psephological irrelevance is submerged by the flood of publicity and punditry over its first-in-the-U.S. presidential primary.

In absolute terms, the March 12th balloting will mean little. Even Senator Norris Cotton concedes that his constituents' verdict is unreliable. "The average voter in New Hampshire," he said in an Atlantic interview,"feels ten feet high. He is thinking how his vote will have this terrific meaning for the whole country. He gets too thoughtful and self-conscious."

Needed Thrust. Nonetheless, the primary has for decades carried psychological significance as a political Ides of March from which candidates, both an nounced and unannounced, can emerge carrying the knife triumphantly in their hands or painfully in their ribs. This year the hoopla will be all the greater because both parties will participate in the winter sport—a condition assured last week when Minnesota Democrat Eugene McCarthy announced that he would add New Hampshire to the five other states in which he will give the party a pacific alternative to Lyndon Johnson's renomination.

Senator McCarthy bared his ribs with reluctance; he had been planning to go to Viet Nam instead. But his slow-starting challenge* to Johnson needed the thrust of a New Hampshire confrontation, hazardous though it is. Governor John King and Senator Thomas McIntyre are heading a write-in campaign for Johnson. Moreover, a write-in effort for Robert Kennedy could fragment the anti-L.B.J. vote that McCarthy hopes to capture. In another show of pugnacity, McCarthy hit both at Johnson and at critics of Johnson's Viet Nam policy who have refused to join McCarthy's cause, most notably Bobby Kennedy. To prove that it really wants peace, McCarthy said, the Administration should replace Secretary of State Dean Rusk. His swipe at Kennedy was more subtle and yet more cutting: "There seems to be a disposition to wait for a kind of latter-day salvation—like four years from now."

George's Afflictions. Ironically, McCarthy's impact on New Hampshire may well result in a better showing for Richard Nixon in his contest with George Romney in the Republican primary. Nixon's strongest support comes from regular Republicans, and he has espoused a consistent hard line on Viet Nam; some independents who might have gone for Romney may now be attracted to McCarthy.

The prospect of losing some independent supporters was only one of Romney's afflictions. In New Hampshire, a $10,000 poll financed by Romney's national organization showed that Nixon's 2-to-l lead has grown to nearly 3 to 1. Republican leaders in Wisconsin, Nebraska and Oregon, where primaries will be decided in April and May, believe that Nixon would clean up if the elections were held now.