The new season: a spectator's guide to the 1988 election.

• Author: Blumenthal, Sidney

The New Season: A Spectator's Guide to the 1988 Election.

George F. Will Simon & Schuster, $19.95.

George Will once compared himself to Walter Lippmann, the model philosopher-columnist, for his "various relationships with presidents.' In Statecraft As Soulcraft, Will wrote: "My thesis is that the most important task confronting Americans as a polity is, in part, a philosopher's task.' With little reluctance Will has wrapped himself in the philosopher's mantle and taken up a relationship with President and, especially, Mrs. Reagan. He has served the Reagans as a social liaison, as a political adviser and, for the First Lady, as an occasional luncheon companion. Will has privately boasted of his association with the president's wife to distinguished journalists, who were taken aback by what they felt was crass status-seeking. Perhaps Will believed that the personal connection to Nancy Reagan was a measure of his standing at the apex of the Washington pecking order. Whatever his motivation, his tete-a-tetes with Mrs. Reagan at Galileo's restaurant on P Street or the Jockey Club in the Ritz-Carlton Hotel or the Middleburg Inn in Virginia hunt country do not certify him as a Lippmann.

While the real Lippmann may not have been all his admirers have said, he still towers over his pretenders. Unlike Lippmann, Will has proved his expertise in nothing in particular. He has written no original work of moral philosophy recognized by moral philosophers, as Lippmann did in A Preface to Morals. Will has made no original contributions to the study of public opinion or foreign affairs. He has written no book based on actual observation of events, as Lippmann did in the case of the Scopes trial. Nor has Will helped promote the ideas of a more interesting mind, as Lippmann did with Keynes's in The Method of Freedom.

Will's brief philosophical work, Statecraft as Soulcraft, with its clotted mass of quotations, reads in long stretches like Monty Python's shooting script of Bartlett's. The comic effect was underlined by Will's affectless piety. One random paragraph, for example, was filled with the sayings of David Hume, Benedict Spinoza, William Penn, Adam Smith, and Thomas Jefferson. The preceding paragraph cited Alexis de Tocqueville, William Blackstone and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Though Will obscured his thesis in Statecraft As Soulcraft with promiscuous ancestor worship, it could be found by a dogged reader: government should act as society's moral tutor. This ground idea has enabled him to sustain a running commentary far more intellectually coherent than most columnists.

Since Will appeared on the scene, he has presented himself as a passionate advocate, a serious man engaged with serious things. A recent advertisement for Newsweek showed Will as he obviously wants to present himself, in his study, seated at his antique desk, Waterman fountain pen in hand, bone-china cup and saucer nearby, with thick volumes of Churchilliana resting on the bookcase. With the title of his new book, The New Season: A Spectator's Guide to the 1988 Election, he no longer describes himself as the serious man, but as a casual "spectator,' scorecard in hand, simply delighted to observe the competition. Baseball is indeed a wonderful game, and Will has rightly called it "noble,' but his metaphor trivializes what he wishes to speak of solemnly and withdraws the gravity he implicitly imputes to himself.

The underlying message of the baseball metaphor is that there is no distinction between being a citizen and being a fan. Politics, in his book, is a cross between a spectacle and a sport. Will...