New Hampshire snow job: white is the primary color.

As executive director for Pat Buchanan's campaign to win the New Hampshire Republican Presidential primary, Peter Robbio has a long list of vital responsibilities. He must ensure that the rightwing commentator's "culture wars" message fills the airwaves this winter; he must coordinate the legions of "Buchanan Brigade" volunteers; and he must sort through the dinner invitations.

Dinner invitations?

"Oh, sure, we get piles of them," explains Robbio, who has also fielded invitations for the candidate to attend Quickie Mart openings and recycling days. "That's the way it works up here. People actually expect candidates for President will come to dinner if they're invited."

In New Hampshire, where the demands of retail politics reach heights unheard of in other states, Buchanan and his fellow contenders for the world's most powerful position have to think twice before dismissing an invite to come around for turkey and trimmings with the locals.

"Nobody wants to offend a voter in New Hampshire," says Robbio. "The line here is, one wrong move and you lose the Presidency."

Every four years, the four-tenths of 1 percent of American voters who live in New Hampshire get a chance to reshape the nation's political landscape. In an era when most voters complain about feeling disconnected from politicians, New Hampshirites demand and receive tender loving care from the men who would be President.

New Hampshire is the spoiled child of American politics - a whiny, demanding brat that constantly threatens to throw an electoral tantrum if it isn't satisfied. The primary campaign pours an estimated $30 million into the state - as hordes of candidates, campaign aides, journalists, and other hangers - on flood over the border, commanding the rapt attention of the nation's political elite.

"There are not many small states that have that ability to get Washington to dance to their tune," says Curtis Gans, staff director for the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate.

But what tune are the presidential hopefuls dancing to when they indulge the whims of New Hampshire? It's not the song of the American mainstream. In fact, political scientists, activists, and even the candidates themselves acknowledge that it is hard to imagine a less representative state.

"Of course, it's not representative," University of New Hampshire political-science professor Bob Craig says of the state he has studied for more than three decades. "First and foremost, it is not representative in the minority area. You don't have a large black population; you don't have a large Hispanic population. What you have is a large white population - proportionally one of the biggest in the country."

More precisely, a large white conservative population. Remember the angry white males of the 1994 Congressional elections? Well, imagine a whole state where they define the political discourse.

"We've got a lot of rightwing crazies up here, and you'd be surprised how many of them are in charge of things," says Mark MacKenzie, president of the New Hampshire AFL-CIO. "So much of the power structure of this state - not just in the government but in places like the media - is controlled by rightwingers."

As the political epicenter of the Western world moves to a spot between Nashua and Dixville Notch this winter, ponder these facts regarding the state that sets the course of our Presidential politics:

* New Hampshire is more than 98 percent white, a higher porportion even than states like Idaho that have long been portrayed as lily-white bastions. The state has no tradition of putting people of color in top political or business positions, nor even of responding to the concerns of minority groups. As such, New Hampshire has long been the only state in the nation that does not sanction a holiday honoring the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. As State Representative Jim Splaine, a Portsmouth Democrat who has tried to promote a King holiday since 1979, puts it, New Hampshire has won the race to be last in the nation when it comes to this symbolic show of support for civil rights.

* New Hampshire is one of the least urban states in the nation. Almost 50 percent of the residents still live in rural areas, and the largest city - Manchester - has a population of only 100,000. Progressive Democrats such as Jesse Jackson, who posted some of his weakest showings in the nation in New Hampshire primaries, know that this state is perhaps the toughest in the nation to get interested in "big-city" issues.

* New Hampshire is one of the most Republican states in the nation; in fact, it is one of the few states where more voters are registered Republican than Democrat. Since 1900, the state has backed only a handful of Democrats for the Presidency, and vast areas of the state have voted Republican since the party was founded in the 1850s. Both U.S. Senators, both U.S. House members, and the Governor are all Republicans. In the state House, Republicans hold a whopping 284-112 majority, while in the state Senate the Republicans are up by a margin of 18-6.

* Increasingly, both Republicans and Democrats in New Hampshire are more conservative than their counterparts in other states. The Union Leader, the only statewide newspaper and perhaps the most rightwing daily in the nation, has for decades muscled New Hampshire politicians of all political stripes to "take the pledge" to oppose any new taxes.

* New Hampshire remains one of the few states in the nation with no income tax and no sales tax, and as a result the state lacks the resources to fund social programs and education. Progressive 1992 gubernatorial candidate Deborah "Arnie" Arnesen referred to The Union Leader's no-tax requirement as "a pledge to fail." Sister Dot Cormier of the Sisters of Mercy says, "Too often, New Hampshire does not live up to even its most basic responsibilities to the poor and the disenfranchised."

That has not prevented New Hampshire from influencing the national political process, however. How does New Hampshire maintain its preeminent position on the political calendar?

"To some extent, it is because everyone's afraid to be the first to say, `Hey, this state isn't representative; the process shouldn't start here,'" says Gans, who likes the idea of starting the process in a small state but questions whether New Hampshire is the most appropriate one.

Until that happens, New Hampshire will retain the political spotlight, through a combination of bully tactics and superstition. Texas Senator Phil Gramm felt the full brunt of New Hampshire's fury last year when he hinted at backing an effort by Arizona to jump-start the nominating process by scheduling its vote several days before New Hampshire's. The audacity of Gramm's move brought sharp rebukes from New Hampshire's powerful Republican governor and virtually the entire political elite of the Granite State. Gramm backed off immediately, with apologies all around.

With willing allies on the political right nationally, and a lazy national media that finds New Hampshire almost ideally suited to the purpose of "simplifying" American politics for the masses, the state has maintained a gridlock on the political process for almost half a century.

Though few Americans recall it, there was a time when New Hampshire filled its natural role as a political backwater. Once, the notion of tailoring a Presidential campaign to satisfy The Union Leader and New Hampshire's flaky rightwingers would have drawn laughter even from Republicans.

It was only in 1952, after New Hampshire switched its traditional primary date to late winter in order to avoid conflicts with spring planting, that the political picture began to shift. It happens that in 1952 both major political parties were in upheaval - as a result of the Cold War, McCarthyism, and the demands of a rapidly expanding and modernizing economy.

Estes Kefauver, a populist senator from Tennessee who was challenging President Harry Truman for the Democratic nomination, decided to use the early New Hampshire primary to garner some publicity for his campaign. Similarly, supporters of Dwight Eisenhower saw New Hampshire as an opportunity to "prove" him in the Republican contest. A handful of national reporters made the trek to New Hampshire and found a picture-perfect setting in which to spin a political fantasy. When Kefauver won the primary, forcing Truman's decision not to seek a second term, and Eisenhower's write-in effort defeated Robert Taft, New Hampshire's "kingmaker" reputation was assured.

Over the years, New Hampshire has played a remarkable role in shaping the course of election campaigns - solidifying Richard Nixon's claim on the vice presidency in 1956, giving Eugene McCarthy a big enough vote in 1968 to convince Lyndon Johnson not to seek reelection, resurrecting the flagging campaigns of Ronald Reagan and George Bush in 1980 and 1988, respectively, and saving Bill Clinton's political hide in the midst of the Gennifer Flowers and draft-evasion controversies of 1992.

But New Hampshire's "winning" reputation is somewhat inflated. Clinton actually came in second in the 1992 primary to Paul Tsongas - remember him? And other New Hampshire winners, such as Republican Henry Cabot Lodge in 1964 and Democrat Gary Hart in 1984, failed to capture the White House.

What New Hampshire does do is pull the political process to the right. Take 1992, for example. Pat Buchanan, running as an extreme rightwinger to George Bush's "mainstream" conservative, won his best vote nationally in New Hampshire - 38 percent. Even more dysfunctional was the Democratic primary, where the most conservative candidate, Tsongas, came in first, and the second most conservative, Bill Clinton, ran second. More progressive Democrats, Tom Harkin and Jerry Brown, did not even enter double digits and were essentially written off by the media.

Yet less than a week later, in the neighboring state of Maine, where the Democratic party is closer to the national mainstream, Brown bested Tsongas and Clinton.

Brown's Maine showing, which actually gave him more delegates than either of his more conservative foes won in New Hampshire, was almost totally obscured, however. In the Presidential sweepstakes, New Hampshire is the big ticket - so definitional that other results are dismissed.

In 1992, few journalists bothered to travel across the border to Maine. They were perfectly satisfied to let New Hampshire set the field going into the Southern "Super Tuesday" primaries, which of course reinforced the conservative tone of the race.

It was even worse in 1988, when Jesse Jackson won only 8 percent of the New Hampshire primary vote. Jackson went on to pull together a remarkable multi-racial coalition that helped him win states as diverse as Michigan and Mississippi, but in the most closely watched race of the year he was written off as a "nonstarter."

Why, if New Hampshire is so destructive to the process of choosing a representative nominee, do journalists continue to focus so much of their own, and the nation's, attention on this one small state?

The honest answer is sloth and lack of imagination. Because of its small size and the highly politicized electorate, New Hampshire may well be the easiest state in America for reporters. New Hampshire residents are so attuned to the process that they literally line up to be interviewed. Even shopkeepers in remote towns such as Berlin are skilled at providing pithy sound bites.

"Journalists like New Hampshire because it's a manageable state in which to report," says Gans, who helped run Gene McCarthy's 1968 campaign in the state.

New Hampshire also feeds the romantic notions of American politics in which journalists like to trade. Pick up an article in any major publication about this year's primary campaign and get ready for a stream of cliches that most Americans now know by heart - "rugged individualists," "rock-ribbed conservatism," "Yankee common sense," "grassroots democracy," "New England town-meeting tradition," "New Hampshirites like to look a man in the eye before they give him their vote."

Ohioans, Minnesotans, Texans, and New Yorkers wouldn't mind looking a few Presidential candidates in the eye. They just never get a chance. As soon as the candidates leave New Hampshire, the competition begins to move so quickly - and it will move even more quickly in this front-loaded year - that most Americans never have the access New Hampshirites view as their birthright.

Reporters covering the New Hampshire campaign get so wrapped up in the cliches and the stereotypes that they begin to read profound - though more often than not intangible - significance into the results there. Thus, after the 1992 New Hampshire vote, we saw articles suggesting that America may really be ready for a "nononsense" candidate such as Tsongas, when in fact the former Massachusetts Senator was unable to sustain a viable campaign.

If there is one inevitability to New Hampshire, it is this: as surely as the snows of February will melt, so the political process that seemed so romantic in New Hampshire will give way to its basest instincts, and all the talk of grassroots democracy will, by summer, be replaced by the reality of convention compromises and the disappointing march toward an eviler-of-two-lessers choice in November.

The politicians know this, as do the journalists and even the voters of New Hampshire.

In fact, the honest ones will admit that one reason our nation's political process is so mutated at the end is because of its unrepresentative beginning.

But America continues to accept the fantasy that New Hampshire has a corner on the market in political wisdom.

"I just wish some major candidate would skip New Hampshire, and then we'd all realize that American politics can survive without it," says Gans. "All that a candidate would have to say is, `Nobody ordained New Hampshire as the starting point, and I'm not going to start there.'"

Bulwark Against the Right

When Texas Senator Phil Gramm, the darling of the GOP right, brought his Presidential campaign to New Hampshire recently, he was confronted by a pair of "fat cats." Wearing costumes complete with long curling tails, the cats handed out fake cash to illustrate Gramm's penchant for promising business interests "special access" in return for hefty campaign contributions.

Gramm was so infuriated that he ordered police officers to remove the fat cats from his rally, only to be told that New Hampshire law did not proscribe feline protests. "That really pissed Gramm off, which was fun," says New Hampshire AFL-CIO president Mark MacKenzie, who has organized a series of initiatives aimed at pointing up the foibles of Gramm and other Republican hopefuls.

MacKenzie happily admits that, in addition to keeping the labor movement alive in frequently hostile territory, his job description includes "driving rightwingers crazy."

In a state where Republican rightwingers expect warm responses to their diatribes, MacKenzie has greeted them instead with tough, class-conscious questions, protests, and even a few personal jibes.

When millionaire magazine publisher Steve Forbes showed up to promote his flat-tax schemes, MacKenzie nailed him.

"I said to Forbes, in front of all these people, `Of course you like the flat tax. You're going to make a lot of money on this.' And then I provided the details about just how much," says MacKenzie, who has led the state's labor federation for six years while working full time as a Manchester fire department captain.

Few Northern states have a lower level of unionization than New Hampshire, but the feisty leadership of the state AFL-CIO has provided a vital bulwark against rightwing extremism in the state. Last year, it beaded off an attempt to make New Hampshire a "right-to-work" state.

When GOP governors showed up in Nashua last fall, the AFL-CIO leader led a rally outside the hotel to decry the growing gap between rich and poor.

MacKenzie has also trained many of the AFL-CIO's 35,000 members and retirees in the state to challenge conservative Republican Presidential candidates as they traverse the state. "We're going to follow them around and drive them crazy," he says.

"I've been trying to convince the national leadership of the labor movement that they should get off their fannies and get up to New Hampshire and engage these Republicans in a real dialogue. I'd like to see them come in here and help us put them on the spot."

John Nichols, an editorial writer for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, covers electoral politics for The Progressive. He has reported on four New Hampshire primary campaigns, beginning in 1984.