Willie, We Too Much Knew You : ROAD SHOW<i> By Roger Simon (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: $19.95; 356 pp.)</i> ; SEE HOW THEY RUN<i> By Paul Taylor (Alfred A. Knopf: $22.95; 305 pp.)</i> ; PLEDGING ALLEGIANCE<i> By Sidney Blumenthal(HarperCollins: $22.50; 320 pp.)</i>

“He was big. He was black. He was every guy you ever crossed the street to avoid, every pair of smoldering eyes you ever looked away from on the bus or subway.

“He was every person you moved out of the city to escape, every sound in the night that made you get up and check the locks.”

This is Roger Simon’s literary mug shot of the man he calls the “most valuable player” of the 1988 presidential campaign, his post-office portrait of one William Horton Jr., the convicted first-degree killer who, having been “furloughed” from one of Michael Dukakis’ Massachusetts prisons, “went to Maryland, broke into a home and tied a man to a joist in the basement, slashed his chest and stomach with a knife, then beat and raped his fiancee while she screamed and screamed and screamed.”

“Willie Horton was a killer, a rapist, a torturer, a kidnapper, a brute,” Simon writes in his searing account of the 1988 presidential campaign. “In other words, he was perfect.”

The book is “Road Show.” It does to George Bush’s victory what “The Selling of the President” did to Richard Nixon’s belated election to the White House in 1968: It rubs some of the gloss off. Like Joe McGinnis, Roger Simon goes where reporters are not expected. He catches his subjects when they’re not wearing their makeup, then turns the lights up. He makes the reader feel as though he’s just spent the night at the police station, looking through a two-way mirror at one ghastly lineup after another.

There are two other just-released books on the 1988 presidential race: “See How They Run” by Washington Post reporter Paul Taylor, which gives a big-time reporter’s look at the ’88 campaign coverage, and the big-picture “Pledging Allegiance” by the New Republic’s Sidney Blumenthal, which describes the 1988 presidential campaign that might have been, but never was.

Each of these books attempts to solve the central riddle of the 1988 campaign: how Michael Dukakis, leading the polls by 17 points in late July could lose the election by eight points on election day; how a man viewed as a triumphant leader could so quickly become the target not only of rejection but ridicule.

A clue to this riddle lies in the sentiments of those millions of voters who have roots in the Democratic Party but tend to vote for Republican presidential candidates. These include the two big blocks of “swing voters”--Southern whites and northern Catholics. In Massachusetts, this disaffected group is labeled “the Ed King vote” after the conservative Democrat who ran against Michael Dukakis twice for governor. In 1978, this group defeated him. In 1982, it lost to him. But it never made peace.

As hinted above, Simon believes a big reason for this group of conservative Democrats going to Bush can be traced to Willie Horton. He tells us how the Horton case came to the attention of the Bush campaign’s “Nerd Patrol,” the Republicans’ crack cadre doing negative research on the other side.

Simon shows us how the Bush team pre-tested the Horton case with a group of Catholic, middle-class, “Joe Sixpack” voters in New Jersey. He describes the impact of the “Revolving Door” commercial, which he calls “the kind of ad Bubba would watch without a cattle prod.” Last but not least, Simon describes how Vice President Bush’s media advisers convinced him that he must either go with the Willie Horton issue or face inevitable defeat.

Paul Taylor, author of “See How They Run,” offers a much less Runyonesque take on the ’88 campaign. Right up front, he makes it clear that he doesn’t like this new brand of TV politics that promotes off-stage characters like Willie Horton to such overnight infamy.

Taylor is the Washington Post reporter who asked Gary Hart: “Have you ever committed adultery?” His readers have known him far longer as a first-rate reporter of the political clubhouse, a journalist who knows the players and loves keeping score. What Taylor doesn’t like is the state-of-the-art, poll-inspired, media-driven campaign of 30-second bites that proved so powerful in 1988, a phenomenon he calls “McPolitics.”

“Today’s campaigns, because they are waged in a society that lacks strong political parties and clear ideologies,” he writes, “must carry more of the burden of democracy. They must serve as the glue that connects our individualistic, disaggregated, depoliticized electorate to public life. At the moment, they are serving as a wedge.”

The fault, Taylor argues, lies with the TV consultants like Roger Ailes, who ran the Bush campaign.

“They are the ones,” he writes, “who had reduced media-age politics to a dismal science: Take a poll, find a ‘hot button’ issue, feed it back to the voters in the form of a picture, a symbol and a pre-masticated attack line. Repeat again tomorrow.”

Here’s what he says Bush’s media handlers did on Michael Dukakis:

“They demonized Dukakis as a boutique liberal who looks for constitutional excuses not to recite the Pledge of Allegiance; a know-it-all social engineer who thinks convicted murderers deserve weekend passes; a blame-America-firster who looks like Snoopy in a tank and helmet.”

Yet, apart from the hyperbole, it’s not clear that Taylor finds all that much to criticize in this made-for-TV portrait. His own assessment of the ’88 Democratic nominee is, after all, only slightly less devastating than that broadcast by the GOP admen. Dukakis’ ultimate claim to the nomination, he notes at one point, is that he was “the last white man standing,” with Jesse Jackson looming as the only live alternative. Later, he serves up, courtesy of a “high-level Bush adviser,” an effete snapshot of Dukakis that Taylor himself makes no effort to correct:

“He comes from a certain parochial culture--Massachusetts, Harvard, liberal--where asking someone to salute the flag raises the case law on loyalty oaths. For most people, the Pledge issue went to the symbol of the nation; it essentially raised the question of whether Dukakis believed we were a special nation.”

As Taylor admits, the attacks on Michael Dukakis worked not simply due to the firepower being employed; Dukakis himself also made a dandy target. His cool toss-off of the “Pledge of Allegiance” controversy opened him to a broadside, one that his rival had no problem delivering before the largest possible audience.

“My opponent sees America as another pleasant country on the U.N. roll call,” Bush would tell the Republicans in accepting the party nomination in New Orleans, “somewhere between Albania and Zimbabwe.”

In all fairness to Dukakis, there are few other Democratic candidates who would have been wounded by such a pointed shot. Can we imagine Jimmy Carter being accused of not thinking his country special? Hubert Humphrey? Walter Mondale? George McGovern? Can we imagine some Republican admen, or George Bush, trying this number on the passionate governor of New York, Mario Cuomo?

Sidney Blumenthal, author of “Pledging Allegiance,” answers this question resoundingly. In his historic look at the 1988 campaign, he looks at what Dukakis let the Republicans do to him and points to how things could have been different. As he sees it, the ’88 campaign was the last campaign of the Cold War. Events in the Soviet Union could and should have led to something far grander: the first campaign of the post-Cold War era.

In this, the most thought-provoking, forward-looking work on the 1988 campaign, Blumenthal questions why the Democrats didn’t make a try of something like this; why they didn’t spend their tens of millions of dollars talking about the future instead of using it to criticize and deflect George Bush’s message.

“Pledging allegiance to the shibboleths of the past became the measure of patriotism and prudence,” he writes. “The campaign itself was lived in the last age, as if the Cold War were raging and Stalin alive.”

To Blumenthal, neither the Republican nor Democratic candidates grasped the breathtaking realities of the late 1980s. While Mikhail Gorbachev was shaking the Soviet Union from its past, the men seeking to lead the United States clung to the past. “To admit the Cold War is over is to be forced to envision American politics in a radically new way,” he writes, a leap that George Bush and Michael Dukakis were unable to make.

Instead, the Republican nominee used the summer and fall of 1988 to make the logically absurd argument that his rival had a “problem” swearing allegiance to his country. A half-century later, he was turning middle-of-the-road Michael Dukakis into an Alger Hiss.

If this weren’t enough of a hurdle, Dukakis had a broader problem: a visceral resistance to the kind of populist message that might have made the race with Bush close. Not until the last days of the campaign would he submit to the “We’re on your side” theme that exploited Bush’s old-money background and big-business world view.

By the time Dukakis got into the spirit of the thing, Blumenthal reminds us, Bush was reciting the same “on your side” slogan himself. Just as Dukakis found something resonant to offer, he heard his Republican rival chiming the same bell.

Blumenthal offers this lament: “Since the campaign’s inception he (Dukakis) had rejected the theme of economic populism every time it had been presented to him. Now he was forced to take it up. Dukakis had found a voice even if it was not his own.”

The great irony of the 1988 election is that George Bush, son of privilege, had beat him to the punch. He’d made Dukakis into the elitist, made him the guy who didn’t need to worry about guys like Willie Horton prowling the street, a guy with too much going for him to worry about humble things like the Pledge of Allegiance.

Maybe Dukakis just didn’t know any better. As the Brahmin-like governor of Massachusetts, Michael Dukakis spent much of his career running against the Archie Bunkers and “Joe Sixpacks” of this world, the “Ed King vote.” What he never understood, what he never got, until it was too late, is that these Joe Sixpacks would be the people who would cancel his only ticket to the White House.

Blumenthal’s farewell, post-eleciton portrait of the defeated Massachusetts governor is in itself worth the price of the book. It’s as stark in its own way as Roger Simon’s grisly mug shot of Willie Horton.

“The day after the election, Michael Dukakis took the Green Line to Park Street from where he walked to his corner office in the State House overlooking the Boston Commons. He was back where he wanted to be all along, where he felt he belonged. Two years earlier when he had first contemplated running, he allowed himself to be convinced that he would be risking nothing. He could always return to Massachusetts.

“It was what he wanted to hear, so it was what he heard.”

Book Mark For an excerpt from “See How They Run,” see the Opinion section, Page 4.