I ran into Massachusetts Secretary of State William F. Galvin in Bruegger's Bagels the other day. The man in charge of registering the state's voting population was right behind me in the coffee line. If you ever watch the local news in Boston, you will have seen Galvin's commercials--he hides behind a mailbox while a couple discusses their car registration and their child's nursery school registration and pops up to ask whether voter registration isn't just as important.

Galvin is a strong politician and possibly a future gubernatorial candidate, but last week his face lit up at the prospect of an election in which he won't be participating: the presidential primary on March 7. I complimented him on the ads (they're silly but effective) and he responded happily that registration and voter interest were way up this year. I'm glad to hear it, but after South Carolina on Saturday (and despite the McCain comeback in Michigan), I'm concerned that the negative campaigning which won Tex. Gov. George W. Bush the South Carolina primary will dampen the enthusiasm of the electorate as the months wear on, or worse, convince people registering to vote for the wrong person because of misleading ads and dirty tricks

Negative campaigning is inevitable to a certain degree, and it's only fitting that the home state of Lee Atwater (the architect of George Bush's victory over Michael Dukakis in 1988) was the site of some of the worst record-twisting and dirty tactics either party's race has seen this year, but those of us keeping score at home know that South Carolina wasn't the first of the nastiness and it certainly won't be the last. When Bill Bradley was taken to task in the media for "going negative" on Vice President Al Gore '69 in New Hampshire, he responded: "I think I said all along that I was going to run a positive campaign. I have done so for 14 months. And I also said all along you can only take elbows so long and then you have to return them."

The basketball metaphor was appropriate for Bradley, the former Knick forward who threw his share of elbows against the Celtics in the '70s, but it also highlighted the biggest problem with negative campaigning: the guy who fights back is the one who gets called for the foul. It is a rhetorical and psychological truth that you cannot be the one to praise your own achievements. Just as true, alas, is the fact that you cannot be the one to protest and/or react to the harm done to you. It happens in basketball all the time--a player puts up with shoves, elbows and the occasional stranglehold until he can't take it anymore and retaliates. Because of what I like to call the Murphy's Law of Blind Referees, the retaliating player gets caught and called for the foul, while the one who instigated the shoving gets the ball back along with a new 24-second clock. I worry that we as voters may be prone to Blind Referee syndrome, forgetting who started the mudslinging first, thereby giving the advantage to the guy with the ball, the money and the longer-running negative commercial.

Basketball doesn't have instant replay, but maybe the media coverage of campaigns should. That way, viewers at home could pause before passing judgment on Ariz. Sen. John S. McCain for calling Bush "Clintonesque" and rewind to the New Hampshire debate in which Bush told McCain that he was like Gore. We could watch in slow-motion Gore's sketchy and obviously strategic offer to Bradley on "Meet the Press" that the two men dispense with television commercials for the remainder of the campaign or when the Vice President charged in a debate in Iowa that Bradley had voted against disaster relief legislation which Bradley had, in fact, supported.

Though all four of our main presidential contenders have participated in negative campaigning in the last several months (and Tuesday's Democratic debate in Harlem produced disturbing performances from both candidates), Bradley and McCain are in a particularly difficult position: Having cast themselves as reformers and mavericks, they seem as though they ought to be morally above the fray of down-and-dirty campaigning. Thus, when they've found themselves the object of sustained attack and record-twisting, they have been slow to respond and especially vulnerable to the whistle of the referees in the media and the electorate.

Bradley stood stunned in Iowa when Gore misrepresented his record and then went on the attack too late in New Hampshire, gathering more bad press and fewer votes. Now, as he struggles to get back on track in New York, he seems desperate. McCain went negative in his concession speech in South Carolina, and though he was right to attack Bush's self-portrayal as a reformer and a leader, the press deemed the speech too personal and pessimistic, even though comparatively speaking it was a low-key response to the insane amounts of air-time and money Bush (and his "unofficial" supporters, including Big Tobacco) devoted to tearing McCain apart.

The negative campaigning probably won't dampen enthusiasm enough by March 7 to lower voter turn-out in Massachusetts and ruin Secretary Galvin's morning bagel. But in the long run, as the March madness of the primaries rolls into the summer and fall of the general election, I hope we won't continue to need an instant replay to see who fouled whom first but rather just be able to keep score on the issues.