North Conway, N.H. ? It is immediately recognizable as a New Hampshire presidential campaign event. Behind the candidate is a display of topographical maps of Mount Washington. To his left is a large two-pole tent with a mesh door. Along the side wall are rolls of climbing tape and 56-gram chunks of pure-grade natural magnesium carbonate chalk, the better for adhering to rocks and eliminating finger perspiration. In the blue and green plastic folding chairs are no more than two dozen souls, some of whom find that their line of vision is obscured by a column hung with tick and insect repellent and the ever-popular After Bite anti-itch stick.

This is the July before an election year, and one of the evergreen figures of Capitol Hill, Rep. Richard A. Gephardt of Missouri, is standing here on a sparkling New Hampshire afternoon, talking about health care to an audience that resembles the lawmakers, lobbyists and opinion-makers he’s accustomed to addressing only in that it is composed of members of the human race.

But here, far from Washington and in the heart of the Mount Washington Valley, the Democratic presidential contender is road-testing his major campaign theme — and finding that though the political establishment thinks health care is yesterday’s issue, some voters think of it as tomorrow’s catastrophe.

That’s why the obstacles usually ascribed to Gephardt’s candidacy — that he’s too insipid a personality, too liberal a politician, too limited a fund-raiser and too familiar a figure — might wash away in the important early tests of the 2004 race, conducted in Iowa (site of his triumph in the 1988 race) and here in New Hampshire (where the newly bitter good-neighbor battle between Sen. John F. Kerry of Massachusetts and former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont suddenly creates an opening for a third force).

Sure, far fewer people turn up here in the International Mountain Equipment store to see a real live presidential candidate than gather the following evening to see a bunch of duffer musicians, locals mostly, play “Pink Panther” and a few other tunes at the green-and-white gazebo down the street. (It’s early in the race, and besides, lawn chairs in the park are a whole lot more comfortable.)

Yes, the store — the very best place in town to learn about product recalls on cable-locking tension mechanisms in avalanche probes — is a pocket of granola-crunching liberalism in a county that voted for Barry Goldwater in 1964. (Truism of presidential primaries: The fringes outweigh the moderates, principally because they outvote the moderates.)

Of course, Gephardt, 62, who walks through the Capitol as if his double-starched white polished cotton shirts were ironed onto him, looks thoroughly ill at ease in a casual open-neck bright-burgundy shirt that seems to defy wrinkles. (Lamar Alexander’s woolen lumberjack shirt, so comfortable to wear and to look at, won him little but ridicule, so maybe voters up here are looking for more than a fashion statement.)

All of that’s true. But there’s increasing evidence that Democrats around the country — and around this state — want a tonic stronger than a slightly more appealing brew of George W. Bush’s perspectives and policies. Dean’s surge in support here and in the money race suggests there might be something to that. And if it’s the old-time religion that Democrats want, who better to deliver it than the oldest face in the Democratic crowd?

At least that’s the Gephardt calculation. He last ran for president in 1988, when Al Gore was regarded as daring, exciting even; when Democratic control of the House was unquestioned and unthreatened; and when Bush’s father was struggling for the presidential nomination against Sen. Robert J. Dole, Rep. Jack F. Kemp and the Rev. Pat Robertson. (The first Bush won the New Hampshire primary after an inspired performance at a dingy truck stop in the southeastern part of the state.) The big threat to American security then was the Soviet Union, which was tottering even though none of the candidates dared say so or even think so. Health care was a peripheral issue then, and not one of the Seven Dwarfs, as Gephardt and the other contenders were described, could cite what would soon become one of the reliable standards on the American campaign trail — the percentage of Americans without health care.

Gephardt showed his nimbleness then, bursting forth as a bit of a populist, which was no mean trick for a fellow who was more naturally cast as Northwestern University student-body president than as any other role he has assumed since, and a bit of a protectionist, which was a relatively new species in the Democratic aviary.

Now he’s got a health-care initiative that is easy to like but hard to explain, something like how Nikita S. Khrushchev felt about the dictatorship of the proletariat: “If you ask me what this dictatorship consists of,” the Soviet leader once said, cynically, shockingly and honestly, “I won’t be able to explain to you and you won’t to me.” Here’s a makeshift explanation of the Gephardt plan, the composite of how two of his campaign aides struggled to lay it out to me at the doorway of the hiking store: The Gephardt proposal would provide employers with refundable tax credits amounting to 60 percent of the cost of insuring their workers.

Got that? The good thing about this plan, to Democratic audiences at least, is that it’s supposed to make health insurance more widespread. The really good thing, even in this state that hates taxes slightly more than it reviles Massachusetts motorists, is that it would require the Congress, as Gephardt explains it, “to get rid of the Bush tax cuts.”

That’s Gephardt’s story and he’s sticking to it. A decade ago, all of Rick Wilcox’s employees here at International Mountain Equipment had health insurance; now only a quarter do. Last year, health-care costs for the Chuck Roast apparel company, which produces well-loved fleece garments here in the North Country, went up 17 percent. “Having a plan out there,” says Chuck Henderson, who owns the business, “shows real guts.” It might also mean real votes.

David Shribman is a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.