Gutter politics in the global village.

He Is NOT your typical slick TV announcer. In fact, the only thing slick about him is the distinctive air of a man who has spent a fair amount of time with his hands in fishliver oil. He's a Portuguese fisherman, and his message is simple. Good thing, too, because his English is bad. "Will you join me in watching Congressman Barney Frank address the issues of our town on Tuesday at nine o'clock?" he asks haltingly, squinting at the cue card.

You're tuned to the Portuguese Channel, a program service on Whaling City Cable Television in Fall River, Massachusetts. You're watching a commercial created by John Florescu for Congressman Barney Frank. If you're wondering how in this age of ultra-sophisticated political campaigns Barney Frank dared to put a commercial like that on the air, he didn't. He sent it over the wires.

Cable television. Everybody in politics is talking about it. Only a few, like John Florescu, are doing some-thing about it. In the race for political mastery of cable television, the Left seems to have a head start. And to find out why, one must begin at the starting line: Fall River, Massachusetts.

Back in the days when the Republican Party had a voice in the government of Massachusetts, the 10th Congressional District was designed to protect the interests of a powerful Republican incumbent. Even many years later, its twisting boundaries still outline the vestigial remains of a GOP constituency in the Bay State. For 16 years, Republican Representative Margaret Heckler won this district. She won despite the fact that in addition to is Republican neighborhooks, it also contained the decaying mill town of Fall River. With is depressed economy and its large community of Portuguese fishermen, Fall River was the only part of the 10th District considered vulnerable to a Democratic challenge. But Mrs. Heckler's voting record in Congress was liberal enough that she continued to carry it.

If Margaret Heckler was angry when she found out that the 1982 redistricting threatened her seat in Congress, imagine how upset Barney Frank must have been. Frank was a freshman Democrat from the adjoining 4th Congressional District, and although the new district had been gerrymandered in his favor, the 1982 race forced him to battle Mrs. Heckler on her own turf. Frank clung to the only possible winning strategy: to carry his own part of the district, to run as close as possible in Mrs. Heckler's Republican neighborhoods, and to "steal" Fall River.

Barney Frank's strategists did not know much about Fall River. But they did know one thing: Fall River was wired for cable television. It just so happened they'd been getting a lot of letters about cable TV from a consultant named John Florescu.

With his rapid-fire Boston accent and his fiercely liberal ideology, John Florescu may no sound much different from the long line of Massachusetts political operatives that had preceded him. What distinguishes this man from the rank and file of Kennedy minions--a group in which he was once a full-fledged member--is not his ends, but his means. John Florescu is a true believer in the political power of cable TV. But unlike cable's other true believers, Florescu has a record of success to back him up.

By advertising on the Portuguese Channel, Florescu saturated Fall River's ethnic neighborhoods with Barney Frank's name and message. His use of local people in 30-second promotional ads and his choice of a "town meeting" format for three half-hour programs made Frank a more important part of the Fall River community in a few weeks than Mrs. Heckler had managed to become in 16 years. For Barney Frank, cable television was a direct line into the heart of Mrs. Heckler's district. On election day, Fall River voted for Barney Frank; Margaret Heckler's eight-term tenure in Congress came to an end. And John Florescu's career as the first political consultant in the age of cable television had begun.

Several hundred miles south of Fall River, Massachusetts, and just a stone's throw from Richard Vigueries's massive headquarters in Falls Church, Virginia, sit the tiny offices of Vanguard Communications. Tom Belford, president of Vanguard, arrives for work looking as if he's heading to a protest march. Blue jeans, sandals, and long, straight blond hair give him a decidedly casual air. But don't be fooled. Tom Belford means business, and Tom Belford's business is using cable television to promulgate liberal ideas.

Vanguard Communications produced the Democratic Party's two most visible experiments with cable to date: a two-hour fundraising telethon, on television time donated by cable entrepreneur Ted Turner; and a half-hour fundraising "documentary" on Social Security. Both programs were what John Ehrlichman might describe as "limited, modified" successes. But that hasn't stopped Belford from producing a snow-flurry of memos to the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and various left-wing organizations explaining how cable can raise money and influence voters.

Belford has proven that cable works for "progressive causes" by the successful direct-response ads his company has produced for organizations like Planned Parenthood. A former Carter White House aide, Belford wants to see the Democratic Party get into the act too. His fertile mind has hatched ideas ranging from putting the DNC on CableShop (an advertising service based on viewer-requested commercials) to forming a Democratic Party cable-television network. If Florescu is the foremost practitioner of politics on cable TV, Tom Belford is clearly its foremost philosopher.

So who is cable's foremost politician? The field is still open, but New Jersey's Senator Bill Bradley has the inside track. "Bill Bradley," Tom Belford says with admiration, "runs the Mercedes of video newsletters."

"The content is flexible," says Leslie Devlin, the Bradley aide who produces New Jersey Now, "but begin by having Bill interview an expert on an interesting topic, and then we see how the issue affects New Jersey by talking to some average citizens. We include at least one segment of Bill doing his job, maybe questioning somebody in a committee hearing. And we always try to close with something historical about New Jersey."

But Miss Devlin is far too modest. New

Jersey Now is a masterly use of cable TV in a state that until recently had not one VHF television station. On New Jersey Now, Bradley subtly shifts gears o fulfill every expectation a voter has of his senator: Bradley the Crusader battles the bureaucracy by summoning experts to his office and grilling them with hard-nosed questions; Bradley the Sympathetic Public Servant listens attentively to the concerns of ordinary New Jerseyans; Bradley the Avenger looks down from his perch high in front of the committee room and melts a nervous witness with his withering stare. IT's a virtuoso performance. And what makes it possible is that Bill Bradley has the good fortune to have cable TV in his state and the good sense to use it.

TODAY, NEARLY 61 per cent of TV-owning households in America can receive cable; more than half of these actually do receive it. And as cable has grown, so has its potential as an advertising medium.

The cable industry makes no bones about its desire to attract political ads. "Look," says Vince Fazio, vice president of the Cabletelevison Advertising Bureau, "cable advertising is in its infancy. We can't afford to overlook any market." Both Fazio's organization and the National Cable Television Association have published pamphlets to stimulate political use of cable. But whether the marriage of political advertising and cable TV will last depends far less on how intensely the two industries flirt with each other than on how compatible they are. There are several reasons why this marriage has a good chance of success; foremost among them is cable's unique capacity for targeting.

"Cable advertising will become the MIRV of politics," says Ed Dooley, vice president of the National Cable Television Association, as he spreads the fingers of both hands and lets them fall like missiles from the sky. "You're going to have 'multiple independent re-entry vehicles' for targeting your message to diffeent areas and audiences." Barney Frank's campagn, of course, was the classic example of Dooley's MIRVs at work, because Frank's ads were targeted in two ways: geographically and demographically. Florescu had determined that the key to beating Mrs. Heckler was Fall River, so he took direct aim on the town with cable TV instead of wasting money on broadcasting from Boston or Providence. And once he determined that the key to winning Fall River was its Portuguese community, he capitablized on a programming opportunity that simply didn't exist on broadcast television: namely, the Portuguese Channel.

The advantages of geographic targeting are obviou--perhaps painfully obvious to a candidate like John Dearie, a Bronx Assemblyman who ran for New York Comptroller in 1981. Dearie spent $200,000 on New York City broadcast television. He lost. But voters on the other side of the Hudson loved his commercials, and polls consistently showed him running well in the race for governor of New Jersey.

"Right now," says Florescu, "a candidate from New York City is sending his message to Plainfield, New Jersey, and Westport, Connecticut. What's worse, he's paying for the privilege. It doesn't make sense." What does make sense for such a candidate is cable. "A candidate using cable," says Fazio, "knows that whoever is watching is someone who can vote for him. The candidate gets more bang for his bucks."

What politicians really find beguiling about the cable viewer, however, is not where he is, but who he is. Research shows the cable subscribes is more affluent, more educated, even more likely to be a registered voter than his neighbors who watch regular TV. The mere fact that he pays his cable bill every month is taken by some to mean he's more responsible than the average citizen.

But the greatest appeal of cable television for politicians is its ability to divide audiences into precise target markets. By its very nature, broadcasting strives for mass appeal. Cable programs, by contrast, try to serve a narrower and more specifically defined audience. Politicians who want to assemble a coalition of demographic groups will use cable to tailor their message the same way they currently use direct mail. "It's not how many are watching," Florescu says, "but who is watching that matters."

Price also matters, especially to typically hard-up politicians, and cable TV may be the best bargain in advertising media since the invention of the matchbook cover. A 60-second commercial on some cable stations sells for as little as $1. Barney Frank's entire Fall River campaign, for example, including everything from videotape to John Florescu's consulting fee, cost less than $10,000. Even the bargainbasement quality of cable ads can be a political asset, in terms of greater credibility than their slick Madison Avenue counterparts may have.

Tom Belford's Planned Parenthood commercials certainly didn't come from Madison Avenue. In one, an emergency-room doctor talks about his experiences with women who were victims of crude illegal abortions or desperate attempts to perform abortions on themselves. Broadcast stations refused to air the commercial, but Belford had no such problem with cable. The commercials ran, and they worked. On the other side of the fence, the National Conservative Political Action Committee (NCPAC) had a similar experience in its campaign against Congressman Jim Jones (D., Okla.). Every broadcast station in Oklahoma told NCPAC to take its ads elsewhere. So it did--to Tulsa Cable. But while NCPAC sulked about having to resort to cable--and eventually canceled the campaign against Jones--Belford reacted like Br'er Rabbit in the brier patch.

The NCPAC and Planned Parenthood stories illustrate a fundamental advantage of cable TV for political advertising: It offers more freedom. In principle, the FCC has applied the same laws of fairness and equal time to cable that it applies to broadcasting. In practice, these laws are much more loosely enforced. And as Belford puts it, "Cable operators are far more 'culturally inclined' than broadcasters to accept controversial material."

They are also more inclined to let advertiesers break out of the rigid formats of broadcasting. Candidates advertising on cable need not confine their message to the 15-, 30-, or 60- second boundaries of broadcast television. Tom Belford's fundraising commercials for Planned Parenthood were two minutes long. Florescu's Fall River "town meeting" each lasted half an hour, and Belford's mini-telethon for the DNC weighed in at two hours. The low cost of cable time and the scarcity of advertising and programming make such unusual lengths possible. Nothing warms a cable operator's heart like hearing bright ideas for programs or long-form advertising.

Congressman Jim Wright had a bright idea when he canceled a scheduled appearance on ABC's Good Morning America in favor of an hour-long interview on C-Span, the cable network dedicated to public affairs and live coverage of the House of Representatives. According to a C-Span staff member, ABC repeatedly called the Majority Leader to shave seconds off his time on the show. At the point where three minutes had been whittled down to one, Wright told ABC to forget it; he would do the C-Span interview instead. By doing so, he drastically cut the size of his audience, but he enhanced the "quality" of that audience, and he increased the amount of time he could spend with it.

There's a word for what Congressman Wright was doing, a word becoming increasingly common among political professionals as the use of cable's different formats has grown. The word is "bypassing." And if you wonder why you haven't read more about "bypassing" in the press, the reason is simple: The press is the one being "bypassed."

"When we don't have to go through you bastards," said John Kennedy to Ben Bradlee after one of his first nationally televised speeches, "we can really get the story to the American people." But the fledgling broadcast-television format Kennedy used so brilliantly in the early Sixties was just the start of a newway to circumvent the print media. Kennedy could scarcely have imagined what is possible today.

"Look at what happens when a presidential candidate gives a speech nowadays," says Ed Dooley of the National Cable Television Association. "Let's say the speech gets one minute on network news. Well, first you see him get off the plane and shake hands with the crowd. Then there's the motorcade into town. Now, maybe a voice-over tells you what the speech was about. Finally, if you're lucky, you get to hear about ten seconds of the candidate actually talking. Don't you suppose there was more than ten seconds of important stuff in that speech? Well, in the future, the candidate will tape the speech himself, and he'll 'uplink' it to a satellite. Local news stations around the country will pick out things of local interest, and cable stations will probably play the whole thing. In the future, a candidate will cover his own campaign."

Republicans outsmarted Democrats when it came to covering President Reagan's State of the Union address. The Democrats reserved half an hour on all three networks and produced a lavish response to the President's speech. Meanwhile, the Senate Republican Conference produced a special version of its project, Operation Uplink, in which thirty GOP senators and several Cabinet members recorded 60-second reactions to the speech on videotape. The tapes were beamed up to the satellite and "downlinked" by broadcasters and cable operators in each senator's home state at a cost of only fifteen hundred dollars.

Generally speaking, Republicans have "bypassed" the press through satellite technology with more skill than Democrats. "The Republican Party has the most to gain from this technology." says conservative political consultant Eddie Mahe, "because there's a proven liberal bias in the media. After all, that's one of the reasons conservatives developed direct mail. 'Narrowcasting' on cable can give us another direct channel to the people."

THE GOP MAY HAVE the most to gain, but with Belford and Florescu leading the charge, the Democrats may reach the promised land first. "There is no John Florescu on our side," laments Eddie Mahe. What's worse, a look at the history and direction of the cable-television industry discloses some distinct advantages for liberals.

Cable TV was invented in 1948 by a man who had nothing more profound on his mind than a desire to catch the latest episode of I Love Lucy. As far as Ed Parsons of Astoria, Oregon, was concerned, cable TV was just a community antenna, a way of improving reception in isolated towns. As a result, of the 12 million people who had cable by 1975, most were rural or small-town, Western, and probably Republican. But in 1975, a company called Home Box Office began distributing recent motion pictures over satellite to cable subscribers for a monthly fee. Suddenly, everybody wanted cable, whether he had poor reception or not. Of the sixty million homes expected to have cable by 1990, many will be urban or suburban, Eastern, and probably Democratic.

But where the wires are going may not be as important as where the industry itself is heading. In recent months, the cable-television industry has decided it needs to revamp its own image, and industry leaders want to position cable to attract the socalled "light TV viewer." Cable executives are studying a promotional campaign created by United Cable in Denver that lifted subscription rates by 3 per cent using slogans like "Telvision for people who don't like television," and "The less you like TV, the more you should join the United family." This spring the Council for cable Information will unveil an industrywide image-building campaign expected to whistle a similar tune.

Such projects reveal a concerted effort by the cable industry to attract what George Wallace used to call "the pointy-heads." Not surprisingly, Vanguard Communications' research on donors to progressive causes shows that "when compared to nonsbscribers, cable viewers to be not only higher in income but also better informed, more active, and more participant."

"Cable," Belford concludes, "is just a good way to reach liberal donors."

But the main reason cable gives an edge to Democrats has to do with the way Democrats run their campaigns. After all, who can remember when the Democratic Party actually stood for something? It remains powerful because its candidates have mastered the use of "coalition politics."

When it comes to coalition politics, broadcasting has its limitations--candidates must make sure their commercials are broad enough to appeal to everyone. But cable television was made for coalition politics. Cable programs splinter audiences into special-interest groups by design: Black Entertainment Television; National Jewish Television; Music Telivision (video rock and roll); Spanish television; television for women; and so on. A liberal candidate contemplating this programming mix must feel like a kid in a candy store. Florescu can almost be heard smacking his lips when he says, "All these programs have very interesting applications in a campaign where you're trying to assemble acoalition. You can pick up the Jewish vote, the black vote, the Portuguese vote . . . whatever you need to win."

Of course, two can play at this game. And Belford, for one, is quick to point out that conservatives also have their opportunities in programs such as Financial News Network and the Christian Broadcasting Network. But Christians and businessmen are not as uniformly republican as blacks, for example, are Democratic. And the Republican Party (perhaps to its detriment) has traditionally depended more on ideology to win votes than on alliances.

Does all this mean the Democrats will master the new technology and crush the GOP in 1984? Probably not. In fact, neither side is poised for a breakthrough in time for this election. Eddie Mahe sums up the use of cable in 1984 best when he says, "It will be disorganized, sporadic, and confused. It will take an election year when enough people 'screw around' with it before people will take it seriously. Then there will be a two-year germination period, and cable will be ready to make a real impact in 1986."

But neither side can afford to sit back and wait. Democratic leaders rue the day they let Republicans and conservatives take the lead on direct mail. Now they are furiously trying to catch up. Eddie Mahe is right when he says both sides need to "screw around" with it a little more. But for conservatives, anyway, it may be a case of screw . . . or be screwed.