Hungary Hot Export: Campaign U As Hungary preps for its elections, U.S. political operatives are flocking to Budapest and proving that good intentions are not enough

By WALTER SHAPIRO BUDAPEST

Campaign headquarters of the Hungarian Democratic Forum consists of two floors of a fortress-like stone building that until recently housed Communist Party agencies like the headquarters of the workers' militia. On a March morning, the building hums with preparations for the multiparty March 25 parliamentary elections in which the Forum, a right-center coalition linking nationalistic writers and the provincial middle class, is expected to run strongly. The headquarters also has some foreign visitors: two groups of well- intentioned but slightly befuddled American politicians eager to assist Hungary in its transition to democracy.

In Room 22 former California Governor Jerry Brown and a delegation of Democratic Party state leaders are just beginning a breathless one-day inspection tour in which they will boldly pass judgment on Hungarian democratic procedures. Brown is having trouble grasping the significance of the upcoming March 15 national holiday; this is akin to a Hungarian being mystified by American fireworks on July 4. For March 15 is the anniversary of the failed 1848 Hungarian revolution and the date previously favored by anti- Communist dissidents for illegal protests. A Forum leader explains that his party plans to press its rivals to suspend campaigning and join in a day of national remembrance on March 15. To American ears, such an admixture of * restraint and patriotism seems naive. Finally, Brown asks with exaggerated politeness, "What is your political objective?"

Next door in Room 23, unbeknownst to the Democrats, a three-person team from the Washington-based National Republican Institute is advising the Forum on campaign tactics. G.O.P. consultant Richard Galen suggests that the party should boast to the press how many seats it intends to win in the new parliament. But Ferenc Kulin, a Forum official, objects that such specificity would demoralize his party's weaker candidates. Not if you don't identify which seats you fear losing, Galen explains. "All candidates are optimists," he says. "They'll think they're the ones who are going to win." Kulin's response is a textbook example of culture gap. "This may hold true for Americans," he says, "but candidates in Hungary would assume that they would lose. The Hungarian people are not used to being winners."

Such misadventures are more comic than calamitous. But a close look at altruistic American advisers in Hungary prompts the serious question: Can the techniques of democracy be taught?

Even as Congress and the Administration debate ways to assist the fledgling free nations that were once part of the Soviet orbit, the implicit assumption is that the U.S., with its sophisticated political systems, can again serve as the arsenal of democracy. From the Philippines in 1986 to Nicaragua last month, no one can gainsay the worth of impartial poll watchers and international inspection teams. But there is also a missionary strain in the American psyche that can inadvertently trample on foreign customs and cultures under the guise of strengthening democratic institutions. As the Hungarian experience suggests, democracy may be the U.S.'s greatest export, but that does not necessarily mean that American political operatives are the product's best service technicians.

So far, Hungary has been spared the contagion of have-TV-spot-will-travel U.S. campaign consultants who sign on for lucrative fees. Instead American advisers, including Dukakis campaign chief John Sasso, come to Budapest inspired by the noblest of motives: idealism, curiosity, place dropping and the urge to bank potentially useful contacts. Explains Fred Martin, Senator Albert Gore's campaign manager in the 1988 Democratic primaries: "To take part in politics in Hungary is to participate in the most exciting human drama that anyone can remember." Since last fall, Martin has wangled four trips to Hungary to serve as an unpaid adviser to the Alliance of Free Democrats, the party of Budapest intellectuals eager to remake Hungary in the image of Western Europe. The emotional bond between them and Martin is easy to grasp: Free Democrats look and sound like their liberal counterparts in the U.S. The party's chaotic headquarters -- telephones trilling, handlers huddling and candidates caucusing -- would not be out of place in the New Hampshire primary.

Unlike other Hungarian parties, the Free Democrats needed little outside tutoring in slick campaign techniques. When Hungarian TV gave all parties five minutes of free time, the Free Democrats went on the air with a polished presentation featuring two pop stars, three actresses and two actors. The party's current paid spot (better than anything produced by the Gore campaign in 1988) is a Tom and Jerry cartoon symbolizing the victory of the democratic mouse over the Communist cat. Small wonder that the strategic value of Martin's help, and that of other foreigners, should not be overstressed. "They are sober onlookers," says Miklos Haraszti, one of the Free Democrat leaders and a dissident writer. "They try to calm us down over harsh attacks. They try to convince us that one slogan is better than 20 slogans. But we are the masters of our campaigns."

No U.S. group has more aggressively promoted the American way than the National Democratic Institute, which, like its Republican counterpart, is in part federally funded. "We're in the business of building democracy," boasts Brian Atwood, the institute's president. "The challenge is to deal with people who are euphoric about where they are but who have never practiced politics." Since last spring, the institute has spent $120,000 in Hungary, mostly running nonpartisan training seminars for six political parties. The goal seems laudable, but the execution has sometimes been marred by the group's fixation with importing veteran U.S. political handlers to help deliver this-is-how-we-do-it-in-the-big-leagues lectures. Haraszti recalls that at the training session he attended last fall, the initial speaker announced, "We have to tell you that in politics, mudslinging and negative campaigning are unavoidable."

Even at their bright-eyed best, American consultants cannot help injecting political gamesmanship into the most innocuous of presentations. Take the late-February training seminar that the National Democratic Institute ran for the Christian Democrats, a smaller, belatedly organized political party. G.O.P. pollster Ed Goaes, radiating sincerity, was in trouble almost from his opening line: "What's happening in Eastern Europe is the most exciting thing in my lifetime." Gyorgy Pinter, a young parliamentary candidate, angrily whispered, "This is Central Europe. Eastern Europe is Russia."

Later, Goaes tried to teach the Christian Democrats the technique of knocking on a door and then shaking hands in a manner that draws the voter onto the front porch so that the candidate does not have to tarry. Similarly, Democratic pollster Celinda Lake suggested that candidates write "Sorry I missed you" on all brochures and then distribute them only when certain no one was at home. These are tiny, nit-picking things, but taken together they reveal the cynicism undergirding U.S. politics.

The danger is that in their eagerness to help, groups like the Democratic Institute will leave fingerprints on the laboratory slide that is Hungarian democracy. The institute's last project in the pre-election period was to fund the most statistically rigorous political poll in Hungarian history. The results, which for the first time showed the Free Democrats narrowly leading the Forum, produced an almost inevitable -- yet disturbing -- sequence of events. At the press conference formally unveiling the poll, a spokesman for the Forum broke in to try to practice spin control ("The claim that the Free Democrats are leading can be challenged in many ways"), while Hungarian reporters eagerly fixated on the political horse race. Thomas Melia, who directs the institute's program in Hungary, defended the survey. "Polls in the Hungarian press were already there," he said. "To suggest that we interjected an apple into the Garden of Eden is incorrect."

True, but one should not feel too self-congratulatory when it is Americans who truck in a better apple tree. For Hungarian democracy, inspiring in both its subtlety and its vigor, still holds out the dream of resisting pollsters and political packagers, either domestic or imported.