333 pp., $7.95

SELDOM has one book had so instant an impact on political affairs. The news media have pushed The Real Majority as the fountain of all current political wisdom. Party heads pored over advance copies, and politicians have embraced its precepts. After the mid-term elections, President Nixon complained to his advisors that "the Democrats read Scammon and Wattenberg." The vogue of political tracts of such influence is usually short. Kevin Phillip's The Emerging Republican Majority was the rage a year ago, but has already been discredited. Unlike Phillip's book, however, The Real Majority holds up remarkably well in light of the recent elections, and its influence will probably be around for some time.

The better known author of this tract is Richard Scammon, former director of the U.S. Bureau of the Census, now head of the Electronics Research Center in Washington. His partner is Ben Wattenberg, a former aide to President Johnson, and now a speech-writer for Hubert Humphrey. The heart of the Scammon-Wattenberg thesis is the simple truth that the center is the only position of political power. To win an election, a candidate "must capture the center ground of an election battlefield." The center itself shifts with the major issues of the day, but any candidate who is perceived as purely a liberal or purely a conservative is relatively weak. Furthermore, the majority that resides in the center is "unyoung, unpoor, and unblack." The typical American voter is "the forty-seven-year-old wife of a machinist living in suburban Dayton, Ohio." Her major concern is what the authors call the Social Issue, "a set of public attitudes concerning the more frightening aspects of social change": crime, race riots, campus unrest, pornography, and moral permissiveness. But-and this is where the Administration misread the book-she is not going to buy hysterical rhetoric and excessive reaction to these issues.

Working from these principles and a wealth of demographic data, the authors make the following points:

The notion of a Republican Southern Strategy is preposterous. In 1968, Nixon carried only five of the eleven states of the Old Confederacy for 57 electoral votes, less than one-fifth his total. From the five Border States, the President got 29 of the 46 votes, mostly with low pluralities. In short, Nixon won not by capitalizing on the conservatism of the South, but by appealing more effectively than Humphrey did to the vital center.

Any attempt, especially among the Democrats, to form a New Coalition of the left, composed of the young, the black, the poor, the well-educated, the socially alienated, minority groups, and intellectuals under the banner of New Politics will be disastrous. This would exclude the center, leaving Middle America and especially white union labor in the hands of the Republicans. The so-called "New Politics" of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy in 1968 was, on closer examination, the same old political tropism's directed at the center.

"It is a misreading of public sentiment," warn the authors, "to say that America is in a mood of programmatic retrenchment." There is widespread support for such Federal programs as educational aid and Medicare, job training and social security. There is much liberal action behind all the conservative rhetoric. In short; "there is no inevitable emerging Republican majority."

LIBERALS have naturally scorned the book, accusing the authors of glorifying technique to the exclusion of substance. They point out, correctly, that the book does not discuss the major issues facing the nation, but only how the politician can play on them to his own advantage. This criticism misses the point of the book entirely. The authors are giving a formula for political success which is not the same thing as public policy, but its prerequisite. No matter what a candidate's ideology or general program, the authors assert he must heed certain realities about the American electorate or lose. The mid-term elections are a case in point.

Most of this fall's successful candidates for congress, and especially for the Senate, stayed near the middle of the road and addressed the Social Issue firmly but without hysteria. Adlai Stevenson III pinned an American flag to his lapel, reminded voters of his sponsorship of anti-crime bills, and lined up the chief prosecutor of the Chicago Seven as his co-chairman. By contrast, his opponent, Republican Senator Smith, ran a smear campaign and refused to reject the support of the John Birch Society. California dumped flamboyant ultra-conservative Max Rafferty and George Murphy in favor of Riles Wilson, a soft-spoken moderate, and John Tunney, who campaigned as a moderate liberal. In New York, Conservative James Buckley harped on social discontent, but in a bland, nonmalicious manner, while Charles Goodell lost votes with his outspoken liberalism. Edward Kennedy had himself photographed with hard hats, and Hubert Humphrey repudiated his former support of gun-control legislation.

Scammon and Wattenberg's dismissal of the Southern Strategy was certainly confirmed. Any movement by the Republican Party, they warn, "toward a Southern Strategy, capitalizing on antiblack feelings, toward capturing the Wallace vote to build an emerging Republican majority," would backfire-an apt description of the Republican midterm foray into the South. Of the sixteen races for Governorship and the Senate in the Southern and Border States, the Republicans won two.

Scammon and Wattenberg, though, underrate the importance of Vietnam. The issue has cooled, but it remained prominent in many races this year. Senator Gore's opposition to the war along with his support of the Cooper-Church amendment was a major issue in the Tennessee race and lost him votes. Outside the South, primaries and elections particularly for the House affirmed the capacity of candidates running on an anti-war platform to draw major support. The authors' reticence on the war issue may stem from their ties to Johnson and Humphrey. The book itself, no doubt, began as a series of memos to the Johnson-Humphrey faction of the Democartic Party.

Admittedly, the book's major points are appalling. One had only to observe Richard Nixon during the recent elections to see how appalling they are. The President avoided most major issues. He did not discuss inflation, unemployment, Cambodia, the Middle East, Vietnam, foreign policy in general, pollution control, civil rights, or the causes of student unrest. Rather, he and Agnew made frantic appeals around the Social Issue: promiscuity, drugs, pornography, campus unrest, "law and order." Their approach to these problems followed the book's advice when, for instance the authors suggest how to talk about student radicals:

-Do NOT say: "Well, I don't agree with the Students for a Democratic Society when they invade a college president's office, but I can understand their sense of frustration."

Do say: "When students break the laws they will be treated as law-breakers."

Fortunately Nixon overdid it. The San Jose incident and its aftermath scared away more voters than it gained. But the viability of the book's central ideas remains, however unpleasant they may be.

The Real Majority confirms the notion that America's salvation lies outside her electoral politics. The political process is primarily a closed system, and change will have to come from the outside. It will have to be movements, not candidates, that chart the consciousness of the seventies.