"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.