If they ever write a book about us, you can be sure they will call it The Unmaking of the President, 1976. Rarely, if ever, has such an outstanding political commodity been so quickly and utterly obliterated. Muskie, after all, had less class than Bayh. And even he lasted through Florida.

Though it is not my purpose here to dwell upon them, there were, of course, mistakes. I personally had a hand in two of the finest. One, which turned into a minor scandal last October, involved the printing of membership applications for an organization whose caucus we planned to pack. Not precisely illegal, but not the ethical pinnacle of my career either. We got caught.

The other mistake is still too sensitive to discuss in detail. It happened much later, and sometimes I wonder if it cost my man the presidency. It had to do with a lie that I neglected to tell the press at a time when not only John Marttilla's guerillas, who were masterminding Udall's campaign, but even Ellen McCormack had figured out how to play the media for all they were worth. And that was a lot in 1976. But more about Ellen McCormack later.

The big mistakes--the really big ones involving basic strategic decisions--are a much more fuzzy matter. Not that no one claims responsibility. With a great deal of grace, our hurly-burly, unanimously beloved campaign manager Jack Walsh, has said repeatedly that it was he who made the bad moves. On election night, Walsh even claimed to friends and staff that he and he alone was responsible, a noble but untrue argument.

For it is obvious that in every campaign there are mistakes and that a major difference between the winners and the losers is that those campaigns which have the money or the time are able to recoup, regroup and alter strategy. Yet almost every decision in the Bayh campaign was dictated by money constraints and made so late that they were binding for the duration. There was no flexibility, and not even Boston's political Vince Lombardi, Mr. Walsh, can predict the future with perfection. It was lack of time, not bad decisions, that did us in.

Which, I suppose, leaves responsibility with the candidate, who entered the race only five months before he withdrew. But that may not be fair either, because the top four finishers had been running for six years, two years, 12 years, and three years, respectively. Who should have foreseen that our electoral process actually begins at some time before the previous election is held? Certainly this is not what the founding fathers envisioned when they set out to create a fluid democracy, sensitive to an everchanging electorate.

Whatever the case, the real mistake of 1976 was not made by Jack Walsh, Birch Bayh, or me. It was made by the Democratic voters and non-voters in this allegedly progressive commonwealth. That they did not vote for Birch Bayh is forgiveable; that the Democratic conservatives outpolled the liberals by close to a 60 to 40 per cent margin is not. Between them, Bayh, Harris, Udall, Shriver and Shapp received 37.9 per cent of the vote in a state in which Democrats usually favor the liberals by 20 percentage points. Fifty-eight per cent of the vote went to Messrs. Jackson, Wallace, Carter and Ms. McCormack, a relative shift of 30 to 40 per cent to the right, depending upon how you interpret the center vote. It is a figure which is frightening, unless perhaps you are Governor Dukakis. In that case, it may be heartening to know that all who voted Republican and a healthy majority of your Democratic constituents have just endorsed your policy of doing less for poor people as a solution to national stagnation.

The point was brought home forcefully to me one week and two days before the primary. Already burnt out and functioning on the campaign adrenalin which had replaced sleep and exercise sometime in early November, I left work at 10:00 on a Saturday night and drifted over to a party for the Harvard squash team in one of the River Houses. Once there, surrounded by non-politicos and unable to remember the last time I had set racquet to ball, I ran into that phenomenon so common to political people who wander outside of the fold; I had nothing to talk about.

So I stood by a wall, sipped on some punch, and feeling very alien indeed, observed my contemporaries at play. Eventually, thankfully, I was rescued by the arrival of JF, our eleventh congressional district coordinator. We quickly retreated to an empty living room and hunkered down to basics, a discussion of how we were really doing (great) and about infighting taking place at the high command (Byzantine).

After some time, three women from Wellesley College--strangers no less--crept into the room and sat on the floor listening. Perhaps they were amused by the sight--two college boys spending their Saturday night next door to a party, discussing the nuts and bolts of pulling votes in downtown Quincy.

At any rate, they were none too familiar with Birch Bayh, and one of them finally asked us why she should vote for him. I was tired but JF was not, and for ten minutes one of the best organizers in the state lectured her on the merits of Birch Bayh; his jobs proposals, his leadership in the Senate, his unequalled record on women's rights, his great American coalition, his incomparable political assets. They all listened carefully, but I could see that the one who asked the question wanted more.

Again she spoke up. "Well, that's all well and good," she said, "But what about the Brazilians? Where does he stand on them?"

The question was not really a curve. It turned out that the girl had spent a year down there, living under an oppressive American-supported dictatorship, living amidst a poverty whose lifeblood was an economic structure kept alive by the presence of powerful U.S. corporations. And she wanted to know why none of the candidates ever talked about those people.

"After all," she pointed out, "All these folks who are worried about inflation, even the ones who collect unemployment and want jobs, they live like kings compared to the poor people in Sao Paolo."

It was not a bad question at all. In reply, I tried to give her a short lesson on practical politics.