At N.H. Intersection of McCain and Forbes, a Caution Flasher for Bush

NASHUA, N.H. â€”  None of George W. Bush’s enormous advantages have evaporated. But the path to a competitive Republican presidential race is coming into view. And, as usual, it runs right through New Hampshire.

Bush has so much money, so many endorsements and such an overwhelming lead in the national polls that no other candidates have much chance to deny him the nomination unless they can trip him early--in the critical initial contests of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina. If Bush sweeps those, he will add to his many strengths so much momentum that the GOP race could be effectively decided by mid-February. Bush’s campaign is like a battleship too powerful to sink on open sea; these early contests are the isthmuses where it can be ambushed.

In Iowa, Bush looks formidable, with a solid organization and, more important, no real competition for centrist voters since Elizabeth Hanford Dole quit the race. (Arizona Sen. John McCain wrote off the state’s Jan. 24 caucus months ago and has no real intention of reconsidering despite some public musings to the contrary.) And as a Southerner, Bush is unlikely to fall in South Carolina on Feb. 19 unless he’s wounded somewhere else first. That leaves New Hampshire, on Feb. 1, as his point of maximum vulnerability.

In New Hampshire, Bush begins with a much broader base than either of his principal remaining rivals: McCain and conservative multimillionaire Steve Forbes. Of the three, only Bush is running well among both partisan Republicans and independents (who can vote in the primary here), and both moderates and conservatives. Neither McCain nor Forbes looks strong enough to tackle Bush head-on and stop him.

The risk to Bush is that they won’t have to. In New Hampshire, Bush could be caught in a vise in which McCain peels off centrist voters and Forbes conservatives--to the point where one of them, most likely McCain, could slip past the Texas governor to win. “That’s about the only scenario where you can envision Bush having any real difficulty,� says GOP pollster Whit Ayres, who’s unaffiliated in the race.

Elements of that scenario are already clicking into place. McCain is making a strong move from the center. The four most recent New Hampshire surveys all show McCain drawing 26% to 28% of the vote, with Bush at 39% to 44%. That’s still a solid lead but a much smaller one than Bush enjoyed only this summer.

McCain is showing the most strength with independents and more-moderate Republicans. It’s easy to see why. With his fiscal conservatism, air of social tolerance and, especially, his independent, iconoclastic streak, he virtually personifies the political center in the state. “He has shown his independence,� gushed James McKim, the president of an information technology consulting firm, after McCain addressed a group of high-tech executives in Nashua on Thursday. “He doesn’t just follow along with the party line, and he talks straight.�

Many of those same qualities, though, make McCain less attractive to more conservative--and more partisan--Republicans. In the weeks ahead, his campaign hopes to gain ground on the right by emphasizing his crusades against pork-barrel spending, his tough views on defense and foreign policy, and his personal story of heroism in Vietnam (which he’s touting in his first television ad). But McCain’s support last year for raising cigarette taxes to combat teen smoking and his relentless advocacy of campaign finance reform legislation most conservative groups oppose probably limit the number of staunch conservatives he can convert.

That’s where Forbes comes in. In polls, Bush trounces McCain among hard-core conservatives; that’s a critical piece of Bush’s overall lead in the state. Forbes appears poised to launch an ad campaign challenging Bush’s conservative credentials on core issues such as taxes and spending. If Forbes can pull away more conservative voters, Bush could suddenly find himself in an uncomfortably close race here.

To have a real shot at Bush, in other words, McCain and Forbes each need the other to run well. (It wouldn’t hurt them either if social conservative Gary Bauer showed more life in the state.) McCain, by far, has the best chance of actually beating Bush here; Forbes is still laboring under doubts about his experience and unburied resentment about his 1996 television advertising blitzkrieg against Bob Dole. But, given the limits on his own potential support, McCain’s chances are best if the race produces a three-car pileup: a relatively narrow finish among the top three that makes it possible to win with only about a third of the vote.

That’s exactly the scenario that took down the front-runner here in 1996. Like Bush today, Dole then had the broadest ideological appeal. But with Lamar Alexander siphoning away moderates and Patrick J. Buchanan mobilizing hard-core conservatives, Dole was squeezed to the point where Buchanan won the state with just 27% of the vote.

Yet the vise on Dole loosened as quickly as it tightened. Alexander rapidly faded after his third-place finish in New Hampshire. Since Buchanan couldn’t expand beyond his conservative base, Dole then dominated among moderates while remaining competitive on the right. Once the three-way contest dissolved, the front-runner recovered to win the nomination rather easily.

Bush has innumerable advantages over Dole, but the same logic could be critical to his survival if he stumbles in New Hampshire. Keeping three candidates viable in the primaries is like keeping three eggs in the air. Unless Bush goes splat completely, Forbes and McCain probably can’t both stay aloft for long; the one who trails the other in the first contests will quickly appear so unlikely to win the nomination that his support will shrivel. That will leave the survivor to face Bush alone. And once the race narrows that way, especially Forbes, but even McCain, will have difficulty matching the breadth of the governor’s appeal across lines of ideology, region and gender.

Appropriately, the parties don’t usually nominate presidential candidates who appeal to just one segment of their coalition. No matter what happens in New Hampshire, anyone hoping to dethrone Bush will have to show the same knack he’s displayed already for reaching into all corners of the GOP.

Ronald Brownstein’s column appears in this space every Monday.

See current and past Brownstein columns on The Times’ Web site at: https://www. latimes.com/brownstein.