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.