New York ? Leo Durocher once declared that “nice guys finish last.” Mindful of that old baseball aphorism, it’s clear that the Bush campaign intends to finish first.

Republicans believe that, in the heat of battle, it’s the tough guys who prevail. Unlike the Democrats — who, at their Boston convention, decreed that speakers should not frontally attack President Bush — the GOP has displayed no such inhibitions about skewering John Kerry in prime time.

They endorse the observation of Mr. Dooley, the saloonkeeper created by satirist Finley Peter Dunne, who opined a century ago, “Politics ain’t beanbag.”

Unlike the Kerry people, who edited the Democratic speeches in advance to ensure that they adhered to beanbag politics, the Bush forces have been exhibiting their preference for hardball. Speakers from Rudolph Giuliani to Dick Cheney to renegade Democratic Sen. Zell Miller of Georgiahave taunted and belitted the Democratic nominee.

Republicans don’t seem to fear a voter backlash. They play hardball for one overriding reason: Voters pay attention to conflict, the same way that motorists crane their necks at a car wreck.

If Bush were cruising to re-election, maybe his team would play beanbag. But the political landscape looks very different. Most people already have unshakable opinions about the president, so there is only so much the Bush campaign can do to change perceptions about him. On the other hand, Kerry is a new face in national politics, and therefore his image is more open to definition. Therefore, as Bush pollster Matthew Dowd recently remarked, the campaign wants to aim its “communications” at “the soft voters” who are flirting with Kerry.

There’s a widely held belief that negative attacks alienate voters; Wednesday, Democratic leaders reiterated their fear that voters would punish them if they got too rough on Bush. But recent history and current practice often suggest otherwise.

In 1988, the Republican attacks against Michael Dukakis calling him soft on rapists and insufficiently patriotic — they were launched in August, after the Democratic convention — helped erase a huge Dukakis lead and propel the senior George Bush to victory. Last March, when the current President Bush ran ads painted Kerry as a tax-hiker who was soft on defense, he halted Kerry’s post-primary momentum. And this spring he stopped Kerry in the Florida polls when he ran an ad charging that Kerry “supported a 50-cent-a-gallon gas tax” (even though it happened in 1994, and Kerry has never sponsored or voted for any such bill).

The pattern continues today. Virtually all the new polls indicate that Kerry’s modest post-convention boost has been obliterated, after weeks of allegations by his swift boat critics that he hyped his heroism.

“Negative attacks work,” says Adam Clymer, political director of the National Annenberg Election Survey. “If they didn’t, politicians wouldn’t do them.”