Grumbling and slamming the phone on a reporter - it just didn't sound like Bill Gardner, New Hampshire's secretary of state. But that's how it seemed in Sunday's New York Times, in an article about the Democratic Party's plan to move Nevada ahead of New Hampshire in the presidential nominating calendar.

Adam Nagourney, the top political reporter for the Times, included this sentence in a paragraph about Gardner's potential to buck the Democratic plan and enforce New Hampshire law:

"Reached at home on Saturday to see what he might do, Mr. Gardner responded, 'do not call me here,'and hung up the telephone."

The problem was, New Hampshire Secretary of State Bill Gardner hadn't spoken to Nagourney since 2004. The man the reporter called was an unrelated William Gardner, who apparently lives in Rochester.

William M. Gardner, a lifelong Manchester resident who has served as secretary of state since 1976, is a mild-mannered man known for his willingness to talk with reporters at length about the value of the New Hampshire primary and the history of electoral politics. On Saturday, he fielded several calls from reporters asking for his reaction to the Democratic plan to change the election calendar, but none was from Nagourney.

After a colleague asked Gardner about his uncharacteristic behavior recorded in the Times, he tried to reach Nagourney to find out what happened. As the chief protector of the New Hampshire primary, Gardner worried not what the Times readers would think of him but what they would think of the state. Like others who promote the primary, he is sensitive to the notion that New Hampshire is arrogant about its first-in-the-nation tradition.

"I always take calls. That's part of New Hampshire," said Gardner, who often touts the accessibility of the state's primary to all candidates, regardless of background or financial clout. "It's inclusive. . . . And all the things that were said - a lot of what was said about New Hampshire - in that article, that's not what New Hampshire and this primary is all about."

In an interview yesterday, Nagourney apologized for the mix-up and said the Times would run an editor's note about the matter in today's paper. "I take full responsibility," he said. "I don't like getting stuff wrong, and I'm really sorry about it."

Nagourney said he was surprised when the man he thought was Gardner hung up on him. He followed up by leaving a message to clarify that he was a reporter, not a solicitor, but he never heard back.

"I was so shocked by it, I thought it was worthy of note," he said.

Nagourney said he felt bad about "playing right into this anti-New Hampshire storyline" of primary-induced arrogance. "It's not like it's a minor thing," he said. "It's not like getting someone's name wrong."

The other Bill Gardner could not be reached for comment.

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By ERIC MOSKOWITZ

Monitor staff