Take Nick's Beef and Beer Haus, remove the log appointments from the wall-mounted red flame lamps, add orange vinyl-backed chairs, two dozen round fake-wood tables and a whole mess of American flags and voila--you have the scene for the September 21 Clinton/Gore campaign organizing meeting in Cambridge.

The venue--the Veterans of Foreign Wars building on Huron Avenue--was the perfect complement to Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton's troublesome draft record. But aside from that and the impressive crowd, the meeting was a complete travesty.

No one seemed to have the slightest clue what was going on. The featured speaker, the deputy field director for Clinton's campaign, was intrepid but incompetent--a dangerous combination in politics. Her attempts to make group plans for visibility events, phonebanking, Clinton's Faneuil Hall rally and leafletting met with utter confusion: after an hour and a half, everyone was still baffled.

The attendees, by the way, were very excited, very middle-aged, very middle-income-looking people. And they were very white. Out of the two-hundred-plus at the meeting, only three were Black--a horrible ratio.

We can only hope that the national campaign is doing two things better than their Cambridge/Belmont/Watertown counterparts: involving minorities and getting organized. If the disarray of Cambridge is a national symptom, Bill and Al are in more trouble than the polls are letting on.