MISSOURI COMMENTARY: DOLE STUMBLES TO NEW HAMPSHIRE

Little old Iowa with its quaint, folksy caucuses may have had its greatest impact yet on modern presidential politics. The shape of the 1996 Republican campaign has been determined in a way that few would have predicted.

Sen. Bob Dole's inevitability is now less inevitable. Phil Gramm's predicted hot challenge went cold. Pat Buchanan's capture of the Republican far right is complete. Lamar Alexander has risen from obscurity to potential Republican nominee by positioning himself as the only presentable alternative if the Dole machine runs out of gas. Steve Forbes peaked too soon and plummeted after he decided to annihilate, with a smile, everyone in sight.

- Dole: There was something eerie about the Dole campaign. His speeches were mundane. His rallies were lifeless. His message was all over the lot in search of a semblance of coherence.

To be sure, Dole is still the frontrunner. He is the overwhelming choice of the Republican establishment, but the establishment may be just as out of touch with the country as most politicians seem to be.

Although many people in Iowa and New Hampshire want a balanced budget, it is not the worry uppermost in the minds of middle America. Despite record highs in the stock market and normally acceptable statistical measures of economic well-being for the country as a whole, there is a deeply felt anxiety that things are not all that well for Joe and Mary Citizen. "Down-sizing" is an almost daily item in the news. Wages seem stagnant. Promotions appear to be scarce.

Balancing the budget in seven years, nice as that is, doesn't address these immediate concerns. "Scored by CBO numbers" may be a rallying cry inside the Beltway, but it doesn't resonate in the heartland. Voters are here-and-now people. They vote their optimism or pessimism. They vote their hopes or their fears.

Right now optimism and hope are not in over supply.

The only good news for Dole was that Pat Buchanan finished second. Had Lamar Alexander finished second, Dole would be, as George Bush once put it, "in deep doo-doo."

- Buchanan: He's the hot-button man who plays best to fear and anger. He knows how to lock in the social conservatives. In the final weekend in Iowa, gay marriages seemed to be the surest way to get the right-wing juices flowing. At the same time, Buchanan knows how to push the populist button and address, however demagogically, the living standards issue that befuddles all the other candidates of both parties.

If Buchanan can remain in second place to Dole, then Dole's a winner. The Republicans will not nominate a kamikaze candidate to lead the party over the cliff.

Dole's main worry is that Lamar Alexander continues his elevation from obscurity and it becomes a choice between those two.

- Lamar Alexander: Well-spoken, civilized, no record, not a wacko. He's this year's version of Bill Clinton. He smiles good, speaks well, looks vigorous and breathes.

He is Dole's real adversary and he would be Clinton's toughest opponent in the fall. He's certainly not the choice of the wing nuts, but, let's face it, between Alexander and Clinton the wing nuts would have no place to go.

- Steve Forbes: The superficial judgment may be that money and negative ads don't work in politics. In reality, money does work. It worked for Steve Forbes to the extent that he drove down Dole's numbers from perhaps 40 to 26. Early on in his negative attacks, Dole was the only target. Later on, everyone was on the receiving end of the Forbes blunderbuss.

In a two-person race, negative ads and money do work. Negative ads say "Don't vote for the crook; vote for me." In a five-person race, negative ads give citizens the freedom to vote against the "crook" as well as "the SOB who called him a crook." Forbes spent millions in Iowa and drove many in the electorate to Buchanan and Alexander.

More than Steve Forbes went down the tube. At least for 1996, he took the flat tax with him. The next proponent of a flat tax will have to spend a lot of time explaining why his/her version is considerably different from the awful Forbes flat tax. The voters in Iowa caught on that the Forbes version benefited the well-to-do at the expense of the middle class.

It's now time for New Hampshire to work its magic. Somehow it isn't fair that two obscure states, Iowa and New Hampshire, can determine the presidency of the United States. There must be a better way, but no one has found it.

~Tom Eagleton of St. Louis is a former U.S. senator from Missouri.