"It's like the English professor who gets to sit down and write his novel."

For years, Gary Orren lectured on politics; for the last six months, he's lived it, as chief pollster for Sen. Edward M. Kennedy '54 (D-Mass.).

"It's been the perfect job for learning--pollsters have a window on the campaign, and I've had very big eyes," Orren, who will return to Harvard next year to teach at the Kennedy School, said last week. Orren left an associate professorship in the Government Department.

When Orren takes to the podium in the fall, he will have plenty of stories to tell--like the one about a campaign that started out invincible, soon found it had more Achilles heels that a baseball team, and finally, last week, began to click again.

After a New Hampshire drubbing, after failing in the South and in Illinois, Kennedy still had the resolve to continue--it wasn't just a line. It became an important issues crusade, standing up for positions that needed to be expressed," Orren said.

But crusades, especially ones down two-to-one in the polls, are never easy. "Funds were drying up... half the staff was relieved. People started doing multiple tasks." In Orren's case that meant training volunteers to poll, instead of hiring outside firms.

"It was a C-Ration kind of situation, a 'lean and hungry' staff," Orren said. "We were living off the land in a more guerrilla kind of way. But then, those kind of campaigns have been successful in recent years."

Extra sweat couldn't buy some things. "If you want the air time, you have to pay the bill to NBC, and that's it," Orren moaned. But here, too, necessity mothered effort if not invention. "When you're rich and fat, sometimes you don't really grovel.... We became far more tenacious about unpaid media," Orren, who will teach on the press and politics next year, said.

"The last week of the New York campaign was beautifully choreographed--the visit to Metropolitan Hospital, the session with the Hasidic Jews, speaking on the same spot in the South Bronx where Carter made his promises four years ago, the visit with Cardinal Cooke."

Kennedy staffers shored up another weakness for New York as well, Orren explained. "For the first time, we made effective use of surrogates," he said, citing endorsements from Carroll O'Connor to Carol Bellamy that paid off on election day.

"One of our failings was the tendency to have the Senator out on the trail himself, a sort of Lone Ranger--if you have the spotlight on you five, six times a day, it just gets too much. That's what happened with the Shah statement," Orren said.

The list of surrogates didn't include political leaders like New York Gov. Hugh Carey or Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan (D-N.Y.), who urged Kennedy to enter the race last fall. But Orren says the endorsements will come quicker now that the Bay State senator has some momentum.

"When you need endorsements the most, they're the hardest to get. In politics, people are like sniffers--they move the way the tide is going," Orren said.

And for now, he adds cheerfully, the tide is going Kennedy's way.

"For a long time the name of the game was survival--we were treading water, and we didn't know if we were going to drown. But we came out of the Hudson River, and now we're doing the crawl, not the backstroke."