Again The Man to Beat

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After the defeat, Brock was as bitter as his boss, lashing out at Bush's alleged distortions of the Dole record. "We're sick to the gills with this kind of tactic," said Brock. "We don't have to wallow in the mud with them to answer their charges." (In fact, the attacks were not so much untrue as they were cheap: Dole has indeed waffled about whether some new revenues might be necessary to tackle the deficit issue. But so at times has Bush.) Behind the scenes, Dole accused his minions of losing the contest for him. "When things go wrong," said an aide, "Dole's not the type to blame himself." At week's end the Dole staff appeared to be coming unglued. Amid all the angry finger pointing, the Senator's aides seemed unable to come up with a revamped strategy for their candidate.

In stark contrast to the Dole camp after New Hampshire, the Bush team had refused to crumble into chaos following the Iowa setback. After a few days of dejection, the Vice President's men mapped out a new strategy and brought in ace Speechwriter Peggy Noonan, a Reagan favorite, to add a human touch to Bush's bland rhetoric. Bush adopted a man-of-the-people campaign style, touring a shopping mall and a lumberyard, dining at a truck stop and a McDonald's.

Bush's point man in the Granite State was Governor John Sununu, a onetime engineer who brought to the New Hampshire campaign the meticulous attention to detail that his former profession demanded. Last summer Sununu screened virtually every one of the 299 Bush precinct captains in New Hampshire. He made sure that thousands of calls to Bush supporters were made every week, keeping the faithful juiced up. Before the Iowa caucuses, he sent out an early warning to Bush workers: expect bad news; don't let it shake your people; use it as a tool to motivate supporters. When Bush canvassers identified a couple with children away at college, they made sure the students received absentee ballots. "We took this seriously," said Sununu matter-of-factly. "We did some spadework here."

But television was the key to Bush's comeback. After much hedging, Bush decided on the Saturday before the primary to air the commercial that criticized Dole for "straddling" a variety of issues and refusing to oppose tax increases, which eventually led to Dole's outburst. That night the Vice President appeared on the three major area stations in a half-hour "Ask George Bush" forum. On Monday, Barry Goldwater, grand old man of the right, flew to New Hampshire to endorse Bush and shoot a five-minute commercial with the candidate. "I believe in George Bush," Goldwater said in the TV spot. "He's the man to continue the conservative revolution we started 24 years ago."