Pygmalion : BEHIND THE OVAL OFFICE: Winning the Presidency in the Nineties.<i> By Dick Morris</i> .<i> Random House: 346 pp., $25.95</i> : BAD BOY: The Life and Politics of Lee Atwater.<i> By John Brady</i> .<i> Addison Wesley: 330 pp., $24</i>

Ours is the age of the political consultant. It is said to be an age more devoted to matters of image than to issues of substance. Personality is all, and even the candidate now plays second fiddle to his or her handlers. What were once back-room dramas are now front-page news. If anyone had any doubt, these two books--”Bad Boy,” John Brady’s biography of the late Lee Atwater, and “Behind the Oval Office,” Dick Morris’ memoir of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns--will banish them.

Political campaigns for high office traditionally were handled by--and informed by the judgments and experience of--men who were aides and allies and friends to the candidates. Such White House staffers as Sam Rosenman for Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Clark Clifford for Harry S Truman, Theodore Sorensen and Lawrence O’Brien for John F. Kennedy and Hamilton Jordan and Jody Powell for Jimmy Carter typically handled the job. But none of these men would have regarded themselves as “political consultants” in the way in which men like Atwater and Morris would come to be seen. Indeed, as press secretary for Robert F. Kennedy when he was a senator from New York and a presidential candidate in 1968, and later as the national director of Sen. George S. McGovern’s 1972 presidential campaign, I confess I never saw a consultant; the word had hardly been coined. By the start of the Ford-Carter campaign of 1976, however, the stampede to join the ranks of this burgeoning new profession had begun.

Today, a new class of permanent political consultants has emerged--people, like Atwater and Morris, whose only mission and career is to work in political campaigns. Where such consultants have usually shown loyalty to one party or another, tending to support one cause or ideological tendency over another, the new consultant--epitomized in the equal-opportunity career of Morris--jumps at the chance to sell his services to the most powerful bidder. As Morris freely admits in his frequently self-serving but utterly riveting new book, he has gone without regret, apparently, from serving liberals to conservatives, from Democrats to Republicans; although, to be fair, Morris does apologize for having embarked briefly on a campaign for Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina.

Men like Morris and Atwater are true political junkies. Their need for the quick fix, the adrenaline rush of a political campaign, is overwhelming. It amounts to an obsession. Only in the thick of a campaign do they truly feel alive. It is what they do. Nothing else compares, unless it is sex, for which the desire of both men seems to have been unending. To be in the thick of it, to have “face time” with the candidate, to be part of the inner circle--all this is an aphrodisiac whose scent perhaps only a call girl’s perfume can possibly rival.

Consultants, one gathers from the accounts here, resemble randy rock stars with their groupies on the road. Atwater apparently had a well-earned reputation as a not-inconsiderable stud. As for Morris, his dalliance with a Washington call girl while divulging details of the president’s conversations is well known, thanks to the enterprising sleaze of the tabloid press.

There are important differences between the two men. Atwater insisted that issues mattered not at all. Or, to be exact, the truth didn’t. Morris, on the other hand, has a quaint, even old-fashioned, notion that issues matter most and that without understanding them, a candidate will almost certainly lose his bid for power.

Atwater’s disregard for the truth (and contempt for the public) can be seen in his orchestration of the Willie Horton ads during the 1988 presidential campaign. That propaganda was cynically designed to make Michael Dukakis, the Democratic nominee, seem a reckless, even deliberately callous, politician, intent on turning loose menacing black criminals upon defenseless men and women in suburban neighborhoods all across America. The more complicated truths of the actual Horton case--not to mention the nuances of criminal recidivism and parole--were not his concern; they didn’t matter. What was important was that his candidate, George Bush, be perceived as tough and unsentimental. The best way of doing that was in the time-honored American way: to play the race card.

One of the more colorful political consultants on the Republican side of the ledger, Atwater was a swashbuckling figure who loved barbecue, women and blues guitar. At 39, he was struck by a brain tumor and was dead 13 months later. Today, he is probably remembered, if at all, only among the Washington cognoscenti. Still, Brady, a professor at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, has done an adequate job of reconstructing his brief and fevered life. Atwater’s final battle, against cancer, is a lesson in courage, and it is recounted with often intimate and touching recollections.

As devoted as Atwater was to the politics of image, Morris is keen to extol the virtues of issues. As a member in good standing of Inside (if not official) Washington, I began reading Morris’ memoir without high expectation. After all, Morris had been booted from the Clinton camp in public disgrace. Halfway through the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, just as his friend and client was about to be triumphantly renominated for the presidency of the United States, Morris was exposed by a supermarket tabloid for an ongoing liaison with a $200-per-hour call girl.

More than just a scandalous affair, it was a story of betrayal not only of Morris’ wife, who only recently filed for divorce, but of the president who didn’t know Morris had permitted his lady friend to eavesdrop on his private telephone conversations. There was the further revelation of an out-of-wedlock child by yet another (earlier) mistress, and Morris fled Chicago in disgrace, if not in shame. Soon he was hard at work on this memoir, for which Random House was reported to have paid a whopping $2.5-million advance.

Aside from his personal indiscretions, Morris had a reputation in Washington for caring only about political technique and process, not about the issues that make up the American political debate. Washington being Washington, this indifference was a graver offense (in some circles) than any alleged sexual misconduct and put Morris in a less-than-auspicious position to write a serious book about the nation’s politics.

I shared this view, and I was wrong. While Morris is more journalistic and informal than literary, “Behind the Oval Office” is a very good book. He provides an astonishingly candid analysis of the 1996 campaign and a clear account of how important issues were to the outcome. Make no mistake: Morris makes no attempt to establish himself as a principled believer in particular issues and ideas, but he argues that issues and ideas nonetheless dominate and win political campaigns, at least in the 1990s. While this insight may not go far to rehabilitate Morris in the minds of those who were offended by his private behavior, it does establish him as a man who understands better than Atwater ever did that Americans have an appetite for substance over scandal. People really do care more--it turns out--about Medicare than they do about how many Republican files the Secret Service sent to the Clinton White House. Indeed, satisfying that hunger is the key to political success. More important, it sets him apart from the school of political consultants who live and die by the sound bite, the lighting or the color of the candidate’s tie.

After the disastrous 1994 midterm election, which left the Democratic Party stunned, Morris tells how he and Clinton created by themselves a virtually separate campaign based on issues in the midst of the large reelection campaign apparatus. This two-man staff, according to Morris, essentially ran the campaign until Morris’ abrupt departure, and the book’s account of that effort, while prosaic, is fascinating.

Morris believes Clinton was willing to do battle on the field of ideas because he had something to prove. “They [the Republicans] never saw my presidency as legitimate,” Clinton told Morris in 1995. “They see me as accidental, illegitimate, a mistake.” And, it was true that in the first two years of Clinton’s rule, the GOP almost certainly saw him as an interloper, a blip on a screen that, given the Republican successes of the 1980s, ought to have been projecting a steady line of Republican presidents.

Morris also tells us why Clinton, who seems at times conservative, is unwilling to join the stampede to oppose and reduce such entitlements as Medicare, student loans and Social Security. The president believes Republicans don’t want to balance the budget, cut taxes or even cut government spending. Their ultimate goal, he believes, is to end all middle-class entitlements so they will be available only to the poor. Entitlements would essentially become welfare programs, thus easier to control, contain, cut and eventually eliminate. But Clinton understood that by defending these middle-class entitlement programs, he was defending the vital center, positioning himself as a moderate.

Believing the best defense is a good offense, Morris pinpointed for the president three issues that he believed left Democrats most vulnerable--a balanced budget, taxes and crime. To strengthen Clinton’s position, he urged the president to present his own balanced-budget proposal, offer a tax cut and fight for an anti-crime bill. By the time Bob Dole had been nominated and was ready to campaign, these three so-called loser issues had been neutralized.

Morris also believed there were three issues on which Democrats could not lose--Medicare, the environment and education. Not surprisingly, every Clinton speech stressed environmental protection, support for education and opposition to severe cuts in Medicare.

Morris argues that a key tactical move in the campaign was to persuade Clinton to begin a major television campaign with issue-oriented ads, 17 months before Election Day. This meant more than doubling television spending from about $40 million in 1992 to $85 million in 1996, a huge expenditure that may well have sown the seeds of the devastating campaign finance scandals that emerged in the final weeks of the campaign.

But the money--whatever its source--was skillfully spent. By not scheduling ads in New York, Washington and Los Angeles, Morris fooled the media into believing that the television campaign was sporadic. However, $35 million was spent in such key states as Pennsylvania, Illinois and Michigan on ads about crime, assault weapons, budget cuts, Medicare, college loans and environmental protection. By the time the campaign officially began in September, the Republicans were fighting just to hold onto the South.

Morris also credits himself with proving that Colin Powell would not be a threat in spite of Clinton’s concerns. “He’ll take away blacks,” Clinton said to Morris in 1995. “He’ll separate himself from the congressional Republicans, he’ll run a great campaign and he’ll beat me bad.” But Morris carefully read his polling data: Among Republican voters, Dole beat Powell by more than 2 to 1. Morris knew that with numbers like these, Powell would not be nominated. He attributed Powell’s vulnerability to his support for positions on affirmative action, gun control and abortion. Other pundits (myself included) believe Powell could change his position on all these issues and still be overwhelmingly rejected by a Republican Party ideologically opposed to the nomination of an African American to the highest office in the land.

Morris’ book is not free of hubris. He often seems to believe his ideas were solely responsible for the November victory. This ignores the very real possibility that Clinton may have had some shared responsibility for his own success. He is, after all, a man with keen analytical political skills of his own.

Of course, the Clinton campaign understood as well as any previous campaign the necessity of crafting an essentially benign image of the standard-bearer. And, to be sure, much of its propaganda was the stuff of cliche and sloganeering and empty rhetoric. Nevertheless, at bottom, Clinton and Morris understood, whether in their bones or in the tea leaves of polling data, that, in the end, ideas would triumph over image. Whatever else Dick Morris may have done, that is an accomplishment that more than justifies the writing of this enlightening book about the way we now choose our leaders in the closing years of the 20th century.