Shades of Nixon.

Shades of Nixon Will the next vice president please sign up? Four years ago, I won the New Hampshire Republican primary?for vice president. Consequently, I have a keen interest in the Granite State's less-publicized quadrennial primary. The state's chief election official, Secretary of State Bill Gardner, recently summed up the vice presidential primary thus: "It's just sort of stayed as a tradition in New Hampshire. Usually it doesn't have much significance, but it's still there and some people think that maybe someday it might come in handy." Most of the time, the incumbent vice president wins as a write-in candidate. In 1996, for instance, Vice President Al Gore won the Democratic primary with 16,410 votes.

This year's incumbent vice president didn't do as well. A majority of Republicans voted against former Halliburton executive Dick Cheney, giving the reclusive incumbent just 11,135 votes?or 42 percent of the vote. Two candidates whose names were on the ballot, Flora Bleckner and "Red" Jahncke, respectively polled 5,566 and 5,752. Various other write-ins and scattering votes totaled 4,289. This may reflect something of that vague discomfort recently expressed by Newsweek when the magazine suggested that, with Cheney apparently emerging from his undisclosed location only "to warn of dire threats from terrorists with germs and nukes, he began to look a little bit less like Gary Cooper and more like Dr. Strangelove."

Jahncke, a Connecticut businessman, seemed ecstatic on primary night, noting that the results were "a case of Republicans voting to reject their own sitting vice president." Indeed, Cheney's showing in New Hampshire is somewhat embarrassing. The only thing worse would have been a repeat of 1992's primary, when complete unknown "Herb" Clark crushed Vice President Dan Quayle, 26,179 to 6,613.

Yet Cheney shouldn't worry. Only four presidents have dumped their vice presidents: Jefferson discarded Aaron Burr for George Clinton, Lincoln retired Hannibal Hamlin in favor of Andrew Johnson, Grant dropped Schuyler Colfax for Henry Wilson and four-termer FDR did it twice: John Nance Garner in 1940 and Henry Wallace in 1944.

Or consider a less popular politician: Richard Nixon, who spent eight years as Dwight Eisenhower's vice president. As the 1956 campaign approached, Ike, who never particularly liked Nixon, kept making ambiguous public statements on whether Nixon should remain on the ticket. Just because Nixon was paranoid didn't mean people weren't out to get him. Sherman Adams, the president's chief of staff; Thomas Dewey, former governor of New York and two-time losing presidential candidate; and John McCloy, former high commissioner for occupied Germany all quietly favored dumping Nixon, reasoning that he could cost Eisenhower three or four points in November 1956.

Nixon's friends undertook a covert campaign in New Hampshire. As Stephen Ambrose wrote in Nixon: The Education of a Politician 1913-1962, "Senator Styles Bridges, always strong for Nixon, had made eighty-seven telephone calls the evening before the?primary?urging his friends to write in Nixon's name. His friends in turn made calls, and the results were impressive? As Bridges intended, it was an impressive demonstration of Nixon's vote-getting power, at least among Republicans." Nixon received 22,936 votes to 5,732 for various write-in candidates. The campaign to dump Nixon largely vanished with the snows.

Who are Cheney's would-be giant killers? "Red" Jahncke is actually Redington Townsend Jahncke, a 54-year-old financial consultant from Greenwich with a Harvard MBA and a family of four. He reportedly spent most of January campaigning in New Hampshire, shaking hands on small-town streets, speaking at Phillips Exeter Academy, a popular campaign stop (Kerry, Dean, Clark and Lieberman also spoke there) and appearing on radio talk shows. He campaigned against Cheney to oppose the current administration's foreign policy doctrine of preemptive war.

Jahncke characterized the primary result as "?a significant defeat for the administration's radical new foreign policy doctrine." Of course, this statement may be just so much bomfog: The results would be significant if the mass media had paid attention to them. As for Flora Bleckner, given her reported propensity to hang up on journalists who have called her at her home in Hewlett, NY, I wasted neither her time nor mine.

Parenthetically, West Virginia's election law also permits a vice presidential primary. However, no one has entered it since 1976, when Dale Reusch, an imperial wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, defeated Ray "Buttercup" Rollinson, a perennial candidate favoring marijuana re-legalization. This year's deadline for entering the Mountain State's primary passed on Jan. 31 without anyone entering either party's primary.