New Hampshire traditions.

It's nine degrees below zero, not counting some serious wind chill, and a coatless Pat Buchanan is strolling in front of the New Hampshire statehouse in Concord. He wears no coat because, well, presidential candidates don't: showing common sense is for some reason considered a disqualification for office. He's strolling because a camera crew is doing a segment on how Concordians are more likely to return lost wallets than folks in less honest environs. Buchanan hams it up, whistling as he walks and then wearing a quizzical expression as he picks up a "lost" wallet. Here was proof, if any more were needed, that New Hampshire voters are spoiled: presidential candidates are available as props in human-interest stories.

Their political leaders certainly believe in the uniqueness of the state's fabled "retail politics." Voters want to meet and touch the candidates. One voter, asked whether she would support a certain candidate, said, "I don't know. I've only met him three times" -- or so the story is told. And retold: I heard it at least eight times in the span of a few days from conservative activists, Republican Party officials, and campaign managers. Each time, the cliche was related without a trace of self-consciousness, and followed by a homily on the importance of protecting the state primary's first-in-the-nation status. Said one, "It's been a tradition not just in New Hampshire -- it's an American tradition."

Another New Hampshire tradition is scaring front-runners, as Bob Dole is now discovering. Critics have managed to blow up his lackluster response to the State of the Union address into a major disaster. Now two polls in one week have put him behind Steve Forbes in New Hampshire, though within the margin of error.

Steve Forbes, instigator and beneficiary of Dole's travails, has done what nobody had believed possible: bring excitement to the race. It's an unlikely role for him. He is a right-wing policy wonk's dream: he has read the think tanks' position papers, and his platform is a collection of them. When a child asks him about health care, he patiently walks the audience through medical savings accounts, Medigap insurance, Medicare Part A. He still plods through his speeches with that goofy grin plastered to his face. When he tries to make a joke, his delivery is as flat as his tax plan. The audience laughs. His events are packed, and people even chant, "Forbes, Forbes, Forbes!" One might assume he has wandered into a revival meeting for a supply-side cult.

Not so. Although Forbes has a quiverful of good ideas, he's not running on them. He's running as the anti-Washington candidate -- as a sane Perot, more than as Kemp Lite. Before a Forbes speech, I overheard one supporter complain about politicians: "They all say one thing and do another. How many times have we been promised something?" Forbes draws support from young people, independents, blue-collar workers -- "people you've never heard from before," in the words of Charlie Arlinghaus, executive director of the state GOP. Asked why they like him, supporters don't talk about the flat tax; they use words like "honest," "sincere," "genuine."

So Forbes's rivals may be miscalculating if they aim to take down the man by taking down the plan. New Hampshire polls show support for the flat tax falling even as support for Forbes rises. Nor do attacks on his inherited wealth appear to be resonating beyond the punditocracy. But Forbes may be miscalculating, too. The anti-Washington message, even coated with a thin veneer of policy radicalism, is pretty vacuous, treating Dick Armey as a nefarious insider right along with Bill Clinton. It appeals to people who don't want to bother to learn about current affairs -- people who aren't likely to turn out for elections.

That's certainly what the boys in the back of the pack are hoping. Their spin is that Forbes doesn't have the organization to translate poll numbers into votes. By bringing Dole down, he has created a wide-open race. Having wielded the sword, he won't wear the crown. Who will? It depends on which campaign is doing the spinning.

It's true that a lot of voters haven't focused on the race yet. Jim Courtovich, who manages Gramm's New Hampshire campaign, says the undecideds "are on Forbes's bus. . . but their seat belts aren't on." In fact, the race is in such flux, there's even a breakout scenario for the hitherto-hapless Alexander. He has positioned himself as everybody's second choice, say his spokesmen, and he has low negatives. That spin strikes most observers as too cute. No campaign is spoken of more contemptuously by its rivals. "If we didn't take a position on any issue, we'd have the same negatives," says Courtovich. Joe McQuaid, editor of the Buchananite Manchester Union Leader, scoffs, "They've got no negatives and no positives. They've got nothing."

The Alexander campaign is indeed a passionless affair. Asked what his basic message will be, his spokesmen offer: outsider; personal responsibility; A-B-C (Alexander Beats Clinton). These themes may be, respectively, dubious, banal in a Republican primary, and highly speculative; but whatever their merits, Alexander needs more focus. In addition, his ads are weak. In one of them, he comes out for good schools. There's something smarmy about his manner; he looks as if he could lick the camera at any moment.

No politician offers a vision of America that is in starker contrast to Forbes's than Buchanan. Yet they're competing for some of the same disaffected voters, who might be called secular angry white males. Following Buchanan around one morning, I was struck by the extent to which the social issues with which he used to be identified -- abortion, quotas -- have dropped out of his stump speech. The cultural issues he now addresses -- the Smithsonian exhibit, the proposed national history standards -- tend to be historical, intertwined with his America First theme, and they tend to be populist hot-buttons. He hits them one after another, with nary a pause in between. The New World Order functions for him the way the flat tax often does for Forbes or the family for Alan Keyes: he's always circling back to it. At a Rotary Club someone asked him about right-wing extremists; in less than a minute, he was denouncing the troop deployment in Bosnia. The world is too much with him.

In person his easy manner helps him overcome his public image. The high-school kids he greeted at the statehouse seemed enthusiastic about meeting him (or perhaps about not being in school). Chris Tremblay, Buchanan's state deputy campaign manager in 1992, says: "Wherever he goes, at any time of day or night, there are people waiting to hear from him. He's really a conservative hero to many people." But his support has a natural ceiling, and he lacks the cash and the national organization to capitalize on a strong showing here. His maximum role in the race is to destroy the candidacies politically closest to him.

Dole's people are a little dazed. They expected the race to tighten, but Forbes's surge surprised them as it did everyone else. They're hoping he's "a flash in the pan," in Dole's words. One state legislator supporting Dole says that Forbes "is the man of the hour, but his hour's almost up." Some even argue that Dole's fall in the polls helps him: in the media hall of mirrors, it has lowered expectations of a big win. Maybe. But the theory works only if he arrests his decline, and his support is so shallow that he may not. If he doesn't win convincingly in Iowa, he'll be in real trouble. If he loses both Iowa and New Hampshire, which is within the realm of possibility, his campaign is over.

About the race, two things can be said with confidence. First, that the rules of the political game have changed. It may no longer be the case that a candidate has to win New Hampshire to win the nomination -- nothing else this season has gone according to plan. There's even some serious, if premature, talk of a brokered convention. And second, that the only thing Dole has going for him is that he's the front-runner. Barely.