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Then came the debates. In the first one, including all seven candidates, Reagan seemed stiff and ill at ease, but his private polls told him that he came across well, that the tide was already turning. He did even better in the furious flap over a Reagan-Bush debate the Saturday night before the primary. Reagan had challenged Bush to a one-on-one debate, sponsored by the Nashua, N.H., Telegraph, then agreed to pay the tab and artfully invited in four other candidates, Anderson, Baker, Crane and Dole. The Telegraph refused to change the rules for the debate, despite Reagan's angry protests, and a thoroughly flustered Bush supported the newspaper. The other candidates then charged out, accusing Bush of silencing them. The absurd scene made a strong impression on New Hampshire voters to whom Bush had been trying to sell himself as "a President we won't have to train." If he could not cope with so minor a contretemps, voters wondered, how would he react in an international crisis?
Reagan, on the other hand, was masterful. At one point, when he was arguing that the other four candidates should participate, Telegraph Editor Jon Breen ordered the power in his microphone shut off. Reagan shouted, with impressive, raw anger, "I'm paying for this microphone, Mr. Green [sic]!" Said an admiring aide to Howard Baker: "There were cells in Reagan's body that hadn't seen blood for years. He was terrific!" Reagan's own judgment: "Maybe the people like to see a candidate sometimes not under control."
All these fleeting phenomena taken together, though, do not come close to accounting for the scope of Reagan's unexpected victory. He won mostly by being himself: the old actor who excited so many Republicans in 1976; the propounder of unqualified conservative answers to the most fearsomely complex problems; the deliverer of the harshest barbs in a voice of smooth geniality. Even though the voters of New Hampshire are scarcely representative of the U.S. electorate, the fact that he turned them on once again last week focuses new attention on that puzzling and enduring phenomenon of Republican politics, Ronald Wilson Reagan.
As the political season began, the nation was supposed to see a new Reagan: as conservative as ever, but speaking in gentler words, campaigning less strenuously, maintaining a benign air toward rivals. The reasoning was developed by John Sears: after his previous campaigns, all Republicans knew where Reagan stood, so there was no longer any need to fire up the conservatives. Rather, the necessity was to maintain what seemed like a long lead by shunning any rhetoric that would frighten away moderates. Thus
Reagan in January uncharacteristically fudged the wording of a suggestion that the U.S. supply arms to the anti-Soviet rebels in Afghanistan, though the proposal was hardly radical. Said Reagan to TIME Senior Correspondent Laurence Barrett: "I suppose I got hung up out of fear of distortion."