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Text File | 1993-04-08 | 11.7 KB | 246 lines

                                                                                COVER STORIES, Page 34

BUSH, CLINTON, PEROT

Three-Ring Circus


Perot's return -- and the specter of trilateral debates -- jolts
a race that was looking like a Clinton blowout. But will the
final results change?

By MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON -- With reporting by Priscilla
Painton  with Clinton, Walter Shapiro/New York and Richard
Woodbury/Dallas


    You knew something had to give when George Bush started
arguing with a 6-ft.chicken. For nearly a month, the President's
men had been stiff-arming the dates and format proposed by a
bipartisan debate commission and endorsed by Bill Clinton. The
challenger was scoring political points by declaring that his
opponent was afraid to face him man-to-man. Bush's charges of
tax-and-spend liberalism, like his aggressive attacks on
Clinton's draft record, were unable to dent the Democrat's
double-digit lead in the polls. But when the Clinton forces
began infiltrating Bush rallies with workers dressed in
yellow-feathered chicken costumes and armed with signs reading
WHY WON'T CHICKEN GEORGE DEBATE?, the President lost his cool.

    "You talking about the draft-record chicken or are you
talking about the chicken in the Arkansas River?" Bush asked one
plumed heckler last week. "Which one are you talking about?
Which one? Get out of here. Maybe it's the draft? Is that what's
bothering you?"

    The bird's answer is unrecorded. But on Thursday, the man
who had been written off as "the yellow Ross of Texas" --
billionaire businessman Ross Perot -- ruffled a few feathers of
his own by dramatically re-entering the race he quit on July 16.
The next day, the logjam over debates burst as negotiators for
the Bush and Clinton camps announced that three presidential
face-offs and one vice-presidential meeting would take place
between Sunday, Oct. 11, and Monday, Oct. 19.

    A lightning bolt of uncertainty had crashed into a
campaign that was shaping up as a likely Democratic blowout.
Suddenly, the battle between a flagging incumbent and his brash
young challenger was transformed into a weird tag-team contest
in which the newcomer might join forces with one man against
the other -- or beat up on both of them simultaneously. And the
complicated debate calculus that had been at the center of
weeks of negotiations was skewed by the prospect of an
unprecedented three-way debate.

    No one expects Perot to win the election -- a CNN/Gallup
poll taken the day before his re-entry gave the Texan only 7%,
against 35% for Bush and 52% for Clinton -- but he has the
potential to swing some key states into one column or the other
and thus influence the electoral vote tally. Given Clinton's
commanding lead, it is possible that Perot's reappearance act
will have no effect on the outcome. But it offered the
Republicans an unexpected break and a chance to beat the odds.
"The race wasn't going anywhere for us," said a Bush campaign
official. "Now we have a window of opportunity to change their
minds. It is not a guarantee, but it is at least an opening for
us."

    Nothing holds as much potential for Bush as the string of
debates beginning this Sunday. The unprecedented schedule --
four 90-minute debates crammed into a nine-day period -- is the
result of an argument, oddly sympathetic to Bush, that the
Clinton camp made in the final hours of negotiations between the
two campaigns last week. Clinton's seconds wanted fewer, and
immediate, debates in order to cement more quickly the public's
general preference for the Arkansas Governor. Bush's team wanted
to string the debates over a longer period of time to give the
incumbent a better chance to jostle the electorate's dim view
of his performance in office -- and allow for a last-minute
Clinton error. But Clinton's team insisted that the embattled
Bush could make his case more effectively in a highly
concentrated manner. After initially balking at the argument,
the Bush team finally agreed. "At first," said a Bush
negotiator, "we would have preferred to stretch it out. But the
Clinton people said that any impact we would have would quickly
peter out, and our team came to believe that might be true."
Added a Clinton counterpart: "Doing the debates fast ended up
being in both sides' interests for totally different reasons."
Both camps split the difference on format, agreeing to one
debate before a panel of journalists, another before journalists
and a single moderator, and a third led by a moderator with
questions taken from the audience. The vice presidential debate
will have a single moderator.

    The big mystery was why Perot was rejoining a contest that
was likely to cost him tens of millions of dollars with no
chance of victory. Part of the answer -- perhaps the whole
answer -- was ego gratification. When he abruptly quit the race
in July rather than face probing questions about his background,
business dealings and family matters, his reputation nosedived.
Perot received hundreds of little looking glasses in the mail
from angry supporters who demanded that he "look himself in the
mirror." The backlash shamed the proud Texan. "His worst
nightmare was to go down in history as a quitter," said an
ex-associate. "It was a burr under his saddle that he couldn't
stand -- he had to get it under control."

    Like some kind of political cryogenicist, Perot kept his
campaign in suspended animation after July, spending $4 million
in August to keep offices open and volunteers on board.
Meanwhile, he published an economic plan -- composed largely by
a team of graduate students -- that made it to the best-seller
list, thanks partly to mass purchases by Perot's own field
operatives. That plan, a drastic deficit-reducing blueprint,
provided the foundation stone for Perot's subsequent claims that
neither major candidate was addressing the issues.

    Two weeks ago, Perot admitted that his withdrawal had been
"a mistake," signaling his intention to rejoin the race. His
requests that state coordinators meet with delegations from the
Clinton and Bush campaigns in Dallas last week and then canvass
the volunteers on whether he should run were regarded as mere
formalities. On the one hand, the Perotistas criticized the
Clinton envoys for promising to use income generated by
upper-income tax hikes to cut middle-class taxes rather than
reduce the deficit. On the other hand, the volunteers found the
Bush team vague on entitlement cuts and short on evidence to
support their claim to drastic deficit reduction in five years.
Perhaps the strangest point of the meetings came when Jack Kemp,
the excitable Housing Secretary famous for abandoning Bush
whenever the urge hits him, bounded to his feet and exclaimed,
"Run, Ross! Run, Ross, and let the chips fall where they may."

    When Perot formally announced his candidacy last Thursday,
he insisted that he was getting back in because "the volunteers
in all 50 states have asked me." Betraying a striking ignorance
of how he is now perceived by the general public, he later
said, "The people want a new political climate, where the system
does not attract ego-driven, power-hungry people." Perot's
brief appearance before the press gave his supporters little
reason for optimism. His brusque handling of a few questions --
"Just have fun, get raises and bonuses, play gotcha. I don't
care," he snapped at reporters -- revealed that the distemper
that drove him from the race three months ago will hamper his
path to redemption.

    But the Texan is not likely to hold many press
conferences. His campaign strategy will focus on national
television -- not only on shows like Larry King Live, whose
softball questions and free airtime inflated the Perot bubble
in the first place, but also on large amounts of paid
advertising. He has already committed a million dollars to buy
half-hour blocks of network television time this week.

    Will that be enough to rekindle the support that actually
had Perot leading in some polls last spring? Highly doubtful.
Surveys conducted by the Clinton camp agree with a published
poll showing that nearly three-quarters of Americans now have
no intention of voting for Perot; Bush's aides peg Perot's
support at no more than 14%.

    Clinton says he won't change his strategy to contend with
Perot's return. That's partly bravado talking: Perot may make
it somewhat easier for Bush to win in the Deep South as well as
in some of the more closely fought battleground states, such as
New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania. However, Perot does put
Clinton closer to victory in some Western states and may even
tip Texas and its 32 electoral votes into the Clinton camp. As
one Bush official put it, "By and large, Perot is a wash, a net
nothing. It doesn't close the current gap or change the numbers
in our favor."

    In an effort to narrow the gap, the Bush team last week
aired two advertisements criticizing the Governor as a high-tax
waffler whose economics "you can't trust." One spot portrays
real middle-income Americans -- a steam fitter, a scientist, two
sales representatives and a housing lender -- whose taxes
supposedly would be raised by as much as $2,072 under Clinton's
plan. It turned out that the Bush team had calculated the
figures by totting up the numbers in Clinton's economic plan and
then making up the shortfall in revenues with higher income
taxes.

    Clinton was so furious at the Bush attack ad that he
instantly ordered up a counterattack that will air next week.
But a separate Clinton ad unveiled last week made the
politically unrealistic claim that Bush would give millionaires
a $108,000 tax cut -- a figure derived by assuming that Congress
would adopt Bush's capital-gains tax-cut proposal, which it has
repeatedly killed. Clinton pronounced himself relieved that the
counterpunching had begun. "We're at the body-contact stage of
the campaign," he said late one night last week aboard his
campaign plane, "and I like that."

    Clinton will soon begin one-on-one practice debates
against Robert Barnett, a Washington attorney who has played
Bush in Democratic warm-up sessions since 1984, when Geraldine
Ferraro debated the former Vice President. Barnett plans to show
up at the first session this week wearing a rubber Bush mask,
a Kennebunkport sweatshirt and a big red "Second Place" ribbon.
(No Perot surrogate has been chosen.) The first challenge for
Clinton's debate coaches will be to curb the Governor's habit of
talking in lists and giving flat, six-part answers. "The
smartest thing ever said in the history of the world," admits
Clinton strategist James Carville, "is, `We've met the enemy,
and he is us.' "

    Bush will go several rounds this week with Budget Director
Richard Darman, who played Michael Dukakis during practice
sessions in 1988. But in public Bush is working just as hard to
roll back expectations with the line, "I'm no Oxford debater."
Bush doesn't enjoy debates and has trouble keeping his mind, as
well as his arms and hands, from wandering. But he can be a
feisty interlocutor, who makes up with grit and heart what he
lacks in forensic style. Bush's coaches, moreover, believe
Perot's presence on the debate stage works to their advantage:
the spectacle of Perot and Clinton ganging up on the Commander
in Chief, they say, will generate "sympathy" for the incumbent.
"Bush," as an aide put it, "will be able to more easily look
presidential."

    Nonetheless, it is ironic that after 30 years in public
life and nearly four years in the Oval Office, Bush must now
rely on the return of a man he despises -- Ross Perot -- and a
sport he has never liked nor excelled at -- debating -- to help
salvage his political career.