An Insider Watches on the Sidelines

He has been sitting this one out--counting votes and talking strategy from the confines of the Kennedy School's Institute of Politics rather than the rough-and-tumble political world of Washington.

But Matthew Reese, a veteran of more than 400 Democratic campaigns since 1966, says he is happy to sit on the sidelines for this one. In Washington, he says, the talk is all of politics and power. In Cambridge, of politics and substance.

Reese, reflecting on the campaign three days before the election, concedes that Vice President George Bush will likely win and that the Dukakis campaign has proved no match for the Republicans' well-orchestrated campaign strategy.

"Dukakis has done an honest job," Reese says. "But he was a little overwhelmed in this new national campaign and he reached out too late to get advice from others who had more experience. He was up against an incredibly efficient campaign machine."

But more than anything, Reese says this year's candidates have used the tools of the trade differently. Over a cup of coffee, the first thing he says about the campaign is, "it's the most television election we've ever had. Ever."

And George Bush has wielded the most political clout in the television arena, according to Reese. "Bush's spots seem to have controlled the dialogue--he just repeats what's in the spots and Dukakis has to find some way to answer."

While TV advertising encourages form over substance, it also holds the candidates to a single, national message, says Reese.

Reese, who was a top adviser to John F. Kennedy '40--the candidate many consider to have been the first TV president--says the importance of television has not increased since the 1960s but that campaigns have become increasingly skillful in manipulating the medium.

The lack of substance is one inevitable consequence of a made-for-TV campaign, Reese says. "Questions about the deficit, the infrastructure, education are too tough to answer with a very simple solution that will fit in a 30-second spot," he says. "Which is why you hear about the Pledge of Allegiance, and why it works."

Reese refuses to blame the campaign's negative quality entirely on the 'handlers'--the political consultants who have scripted the campaign and controlled the candidates to ensure the maximum number of sound bites. "That's the ultimate cop-out," he says.

"We don't elect the advisers; we elect the president. Bush could stop this at any time, and he hasn't." In fact, he says Bush has been "hermetically sealed" by his protective and canny advisers.

The vice president has kept to the scripts written for him by such experienced campaigners as Roger Ailes--Bush's top media consultant and one of the men behind Richard Nixon's two victories, Reese says.

"We know what Roger Ailes feels and what Jim Baker views, but we don't know anything about what George Bush will do," Reese says--a statement that echoes throughout his analysis of the current campaign.

An admittedly partisan Democrat, Reese says Bush has given no indication of what he hopes to accomplish in the White House: "We have no idea what Mr. Bush is going to do as president. All we know is that he is for people saying the Pledge of Allegiance, preventing Black men from raping white women and against the ACLU. I don't know anything else about him," he says.

And those tactics have been extraordinarily successful for Bush, he acknowledges. By taking the offensive and defying political conventions that say that negative advertising should never be used early on in a presidential campaign, Bush has successfully set the terms of the debate.

"At the beginning of the campaign, Dukakis and Bush were like line drawings as in a coloring book and they have to be colored in," Reese says. "Bush was in pastels, with a reputation for being a wimp and so forth, but in identifying Dukakis as short on patriotism, soft on crime and weak on defense, Bush very vividly colored Michael Dukakis in."

"And in coloring Mike Dukakis, he colored himself in," Reese adds. "He counters his wimpish image by drawing those distinctions between himself and Dukakis."

Dukakis should also take some blame for his campaign's inability to respond to the Bush charges, said Reese. The Massachusetts governor, he said, lacks experience in national politics and personally dislikes mudslinging--facts that have strongly stacked the deck against the Democratic nominee.

Reese dates the tide of Republican negative campaigning back to the time of the party's August convention. Dukakis was slow to respond partially because he "has a natural aversion to that kind of campaigning and I think he resisted it longer than his staff wanted," he says.

He adds that "the campaign during those times didn't seem to be organized enough to make those decisions," and that "when charges are so outrageous, you think they'll go away or backlash. That's the established wisdom and it holds true in most House and Senate races, for example."

Reese, who peppers his political analyses with anecdotes from campaigns past, says it is the American electorate that has changed the most since he entered politics in the early 1950s. To Reese, "Voters have become very cynical and prompt to believe, in the absence of contradiction, what is said."

Part of that is the legacy of the Reagan presidency, Reese says. Reagan "ran as a head of state, not a head of government and people liked that, and Bush is doing the same things. Which was why you had the Teflon presidency--you don't piss on the Queen, as people say."

But even Reagan's 1980 campaign advertisements were specific about his agenda for the country, which Bush's aren't, Reese says.

Much of the lowering in voters' standards, however, can be traced to the abuses of power that have transformed the presidency. Watergate, the hostage crisis, the Iran-contra affair--all contributed to diminished expectations of the president, Reese says.

The new credulousness of voters is perhaps best mirrored in their acceptance of the word `liberal' as an insult to Dukakis. "Conservativism is faddish, and people have begun to say liberalism is bad and it stuck," he says.

That label-pinning is a function of the instant analysis afforded by TV coverage, Reese notes. "It's part of the spin, the angle," he says.

Reese says he doesn't believe Americans are no longer liberals--simply that Democrats have failed to redefine the word. The Dukakis campaign, by not taking the "L-word" issue as a chance to say what liberalism means, has suffered as a result.

"What he ought to say is, "if liberalism means that I am going to clean up the 300 or whatever toxic waste dumps in the United States, then I'm a liberal.' There are many other issues--Social Security, Medicare, the Marshall Plan--on which you can say 'yes, I'm a liberal'," Reese says.

Reese, who doesn't mind being called a liberal, supported Joe Biden, Paul Simon and Albert Gore consecutively in the primaries before he got behind the Democratic nominee. But he says Dukakis is a credible candidate in the liberal tradition, one he is proud to support.