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                                                                                U.S. POLITICS, Page 30

Perot Calls in the Pros


But the Bush camp is still looking for Mr. Bad Guy to whip a
listless campaign into shape

By MICHAEL DUFFY/WASHINGTON -- With reporting by Dan Goodgame/
Washington


    George Bush and Ed Rollins have never enjoyed an easy
relationship. As Vice President, Bush despised the Republican
political consultant's habit of dumping on g.o.p. candidates who
performed poorly in public. Two years ago, Bush tried to have
Rollins fired after he urged Republican congressional candidates
by fax to "oppose the President" and his support for a 1990 tax
increase. Four months ago, when Bush needed to shore up his
political position, he hired Rollins' wife rather than the
veteran White House operative. Relations began to warm three
weeks ago when, according to a senior Administration official,
Rollins sent Bush a handwritten letter explaining in detail why
the incumbent President would, and should, be re-elected.
Rollins even offered to help.

    But when Rollins teamed up with former Carter White House
chief of staff Hamilton Jordan last week to run the still
unannounced presidential campaign of billionaire Ross Perot,
Bush and his aides took it as a sign of personal betrayal. By
turns shocked and furious, they vowed that Rollins had ruined
his future in the Republican Party and accused him of car ing
about little more than money and revenge. Once they simmered
down, a harsher reality set in: Perot had signed up a pair of
veteran strategists who had helped win the White House three
times in five tries and were now joining forces in a bid to do
it again.

    Suddenly Perot has the White House panicked. Where there
was once talk of easy victory, there are now private murmurs of
possible defeat. That scenario is made more plausible by a
TIME/cnn poll, taken last week, that shows the Texas businessman
with a 13% lead and Bush tied with Clinton for second place.
With Perot's A team in place, there are growing signs of
further shake-ups at both the White House and the re-election
campaign headquarters, where most of the squad is regarded as
decidedly second string. A senior Administration official who
just days earlier denied published rumors of James Baker's
return now openly predicts that the Secretary of State will take
a "leave of absence" from his Cabinet post to replace the
ineffectual Robert Mosbacher as campaign chairman. Such a move
would be timed to follow the party's Houston convention in
August -- unless Bush's fortunes turn up by then. "The President
would rather not do that, and neither would Baker," the senior
official said. But everyone close to Bush knows he was serious
when he promised late last year, "I'll do what I have to do to
be re-elected."

    That pledge has even more resonance now that Perot has
signed up two men who understand their own parties' weaknesses.
The son of a California electrician who grew up in public
housing, Rollins is in many ways typical of the Reagan Democrats
who began to abandon the party in the late 1960s and early
1970s. Rollins worked for Reagan in 1980 and 1984, then ran Jack
Kemp's ill-fated 1988 bid for the Republican presidential
nomination. Still built like the high school wrestler he once
was, Rollins is a nuts-and-bolts political operative who,
friends say, was restless in the private sector and still angry
at an Administration that had never embraced him. When Bush
aides sent feelers about his organizing California for Bush,
Rollins exploded, "I ran 50 states!" Explained a Rollins
partisan: "For Ed, part of this is the screw-you factor."

    Unlike Rollins, whose help Perot enlisted, Jordan
volunteered his services several weeks ago after watching Perot
on Larry King's TV show. More cerebral than his aw-shucks manner
might suggest, Jordan went to work for Carter in the late 1960s
and drafted the 1972 memo that served as the blueprint for
Carter's march from Georgian obscurity to the White House.
Carter's campaign as an outsider running against Washington in
1976, notes his longtime friend Bert Lance, is reminiscent of
Perot's pose as a new broom unsullied by politics.

    In the anti-campaign, Rollins and Jordan say, they will be
anti-handlers. As Perot put it, "They will not get me up in the
morning, dress me, give me words to say, tell me what to do and
where to go." Rollins will run the day-to-day campaign while
Jordan concentrates on strategy and themes. Demonstrating what
are increasingly formidable political skills, Perot sprang the
announcement the day after the California primary, thereby
eclipsing what should have been Bill Clinton's afterglow of
triumph. "I think one of the challenges for Ed and myself," said
Jordan, "is not to try to fix something that's not broken."

    But it would be a mistake to underestimate the task facing
the two men. Their biggest challenge will be to erect a
nationwide organization without upsetting the enormous volunteer
corps that got the Perot balloon off the ground. In addition,
the gauzy notion of a bipartisan campaign, run jointly by a
Democrat and a Repub lican, sounds better in theory than in
practice. Rollins and Jordan, never before having teamed up even
in their wildest dreams, may not agree instantly on the best
approach, for example, to urban blacks or Southern evangelicals.
And getting along with Perot may be harder than getting along
with each other: Rollins met Perot only last weekend, and
Jordan's relationship with the populist plutocrat predates
Rollins' by only a few months. Rollins' penchant for candidly
criticizing his own clients will eventually put Perot's
legendary thin skin to the test.

    Bush, however, has plenty of his own troubles. His top
advisers, split between the West Wing and campaign headquarters
a few blocks away, are at each other's throats. The rumor last
month that Baker would soon return as chief of staff was started
by Mosbacher and friends, who think it is Sam Skinner's White
House, not the campaign, that needs fixing. White House
officials fired back last week, predicting Baker would return
-- but only to give the listless campaign a boost.

    Baker would provide something Bush has lacked since John
Sununu departed last December: a high-level bad cop who can keep
the troops in line and sometimes read the riot act to Bush
himself. Bush's aversion to conflict makes him a congenial
fellow, which is a recipe for failure in a presidential
campaign. Yet Bush resents having to ask Baker to bail him out
one more time, and the Secretary has long since grown tired of
coming to the rescue. Bush's aides concede there is little they
an do during the next six weeks to break Perot's grip on the
public's attention. But that did not stop the President from
calling a rare prime-time press conference last week in a vain
bid for network coverage. Only CNN and C-SPAN broadcast the
event, which was designed to showcase an angry President
pressing a reluctant Congress for a balanced-budget amendment
-- an issue that, not coincidentally, has begun to work in
Perot's favor. "In the face of a several-hundred-billion-dollar
deficit," said Bush, "a piecemeal approach simply will not do
the job." The bald hypocrisy of this gambit seemed lost on
Bush, who not only has never submitted a balanced budget but who
had not shown much interest in the amendment before last month.
His pallid performance only added evidence that Bush defines
leadership as imploring Congress to do something that he
himself will not do.

    Bush refused to engage Perot directly, saying he would
prefer to wait until the "time warp" of summer has given way to
the fall battle. But the press conference also emphasized just
how out of touch Bush seems. When a reporter asked whether the
President's low standing in the polls was not a rejection of his
message, Bush's fuzzy answer hardly suggested a firm fix on the
public mood: "I don't think so, because you ask in these deadly
polls that you read all the time, you know, about -- relating
to issues -- and it's vague out there." Groping for specifics,
the President complained about the polls indicating that most
Americans believed the economy was getting worse, while,
according to Bush, things were clearly improving. The next
morning the Administration's own economists reported that
unemployment increased last month to 7.5%, the highest level
since 1984.

    The slickest handlers in the world cannot turn that kind
of performance into a showstopper. There are limits to what
handlers can accomplish in any case -- especially in a volatile
three-way race. They can advise a candidate on strategy, feed
him sound bites and even choose his ties. But in the end, the
public is going to measure the candidate alone.