BOOK REVIEW : The Primary Industry in New Hampshire : GRASS ROOTS: One Year in the Life of the New Hampshire Primary <i> by Dayton Duncan</i> Viking $22.95, 379 pages

The names littered through the pages of “Grass Roots” are familiar, but you may not remember exactly why: Babbitt, Du Pont, Haig, Jackson, Robertson, even Paul Simon--the senator, that is, not the singer. By now, you may have forgotten that each of these men braved the snows of New Hampshire in pursuit of his party’s presidential nomination in 1988.

If so, “Grass Roots”--an intimate account of the 1988 primary as it unfolded in New Hampshire’s Cheshire County--will remind you in excruciating detail. Day by day, sometimes hour by hour, Dayton Duncan shows us the “home parties,” the telephone banks, the door-to-door canvassing, the strategy sessions, and all the other ritual and tedium of a primary campaign.

What emerges from Duncan’s study of presidential politics in a single New Hampshire county is the sense that the New Hampshire primary is less a matter of ideological commitment than a kind of local industry, rather like tapping maple syrup and selling it to the tourists in picturesque tins, or--perhaps more to the point--the frog-jumping contest in Calaveras County.

Among the most telling profiles in “Grass Roots,” for example, focuses on a young woman named Andi Johnson, who joins the Gary Hart campaign after going to one of his speeches “out of curiosity.” She calls the candidate by his first name, meets a boyfriend in the campaign, spends her weekends on the road.

“These weekends were like supercharged rendezvous in a passionate affair,” Duncan observes. “The things she cared the most about--her boyfriend, politics, the sense of crusade and mission within the campaign--were intertwined and packed into those days. She loved it, couldn’t get enough of it. Most definitely she was hooked.”

Indeed, the entire state of New Hampshire is hooked, as Duncan makes clear in “Grass Roots.” Signing up with one candidate or another appears to be a matter of indifference--what counts is to get into the game. And so, when Gary Hart’s campaign self-destructs over the issue of adultery (“I think it’s a setup,” Andi told a newspaper reporter, “Gary is too honest.”), she deftly jumps to the campaign of Joe Biden; when Biden self-destructs over the issue of plagiarism, she lands in the Simon campaign.

“Paul Simon is safe ,” she decides in a moment of unwitting hilarity. “I think I’m ready for safe.”

Still, there’s a terrible sameness about each of these candidates and their New Hampshire campaigns. Only the campaign workers whom Duncan has profiled with such care and compassion come alive--the politicos are interchangeable. And the candidates who come a-courting apparently feel the same way; Duncan reports that George Bush’s political action committee “donated money to every Republican candidate for every elective office in New Hampshire,” including not only Gov. John Sununu but also 267 legislative candidates.

Duncan, not unlike the men and women whom he describes in “Grass Roots,” is a political junkie. He is deeply experienced in the politics of New Hampshire, where he spent nearly 20 years as a newspaperman. He has served on the campaign staffs of Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis. But, just in case the reader is not convinced, Duncan is quick to remind us exactly why all of this is so important.

“The political logic was compellingly straightforward: win New Hampshire or don’t win the White House,” Duncan insists. “Since the introduction of its first-in-the-nation preference primary in 1952, no one has won the presidency without first winning in New Hampshire.”

Duncan makes the same point, again and again, as if to reassure the fainthearted reader to press on. The reader who is not a political junkie, I’m afraid, may need the encouragement.

Next: Richard Eder reviews “The Ragged Way People Fall Out of Love” by Elizabeth Cox (North Point Press).