The presidential candidates switched roles last week. While Perot played the typical pol, the traditional politicians aped Perot. Bill Clinton, Dan Quayle and even George Bush were mired in the muck of the talk-show campaign trail Perot had blazed. Clinton jousted with Sister Souljah and Jesse Jackson over who was or was not a racist (page 46). Quayle squared off against rapper Ice-T and was blamed by a 12-year-old spelling-bee contestant for blowing the word “potato. " Even Bush did a tube-talk drop-by, but declared that he was no “teeny-bopper” and therefore (unlike Clinton) was no candidate for a gig on MTV.
Perot is smart enough to know that talkshow talk alone does not a president elect. He has launched a second, more traditional, phase of his presidential crusade. Perot and his new machine now face a host of prosaically political challenges. He seems stalled in the polls, and it’s not clear where his next batch of supporters will come from. A barrage of press stories has inflicted what one aide calls “nicks and cuts,” not more. Demands are growing for Perot to come across with specifies to back up his pledge to eradicate the deficit, revive the industrial economy and save the nation’s schools and cities. Perot was momentarily flustered last week by hecklers at a Sacramento, Calif., rally, who demanded that he “talk about the issues.”
To meet the challenges, Perot is assembling a " world-class” campaign, a bipartisan blend of veteran Washington operators and corporate admen. The question is whether Perot can absorb the benefits of this high-priced expertise without sullying what made him so appealing to many voters in the first place: his standing as the outsider, determined to “clean out the barn” of politics.
The Perot machine’s summer dream is to pile up a lead so wide that its candidate can’t blow it. He still leads in some national polls and is ahead-though short of a majority -in hypothetical Electoral College vote counts. But he is sure to come under a withering assault from Clinton and Bush after the party-nominating conventions. Perot’s director of research, Frank Luntz, says that in the last seven presidential elections, only one candidate who was ahead on Labor Day (Jimmy Carter in 1980) ended up losing.
The Perotians have been looking to buy a “roadblock” of time on all networks for a live appearance by their man. This Sunday was the original target, since abandoned. They’re now looking at the Fourth of July. Films of various Perot TV interviews are being reviewed for possible use as a mass-distribution video. To keep volunteers engaged, the campaign is planning a series of regional mini-conventions through the summer, to be capped by a “kickoff " national rally after the GOP convention.
To polish Perot’s image, his campaign will use the standard tool of presidential politics: an expensive advertising blitz. In recent weeks Perot has been depicted in press reports, and by Republican operatives, as a ruthless businessman, obsessed with global conspiracy theories and eager to put gumshoes on the trail of his commercial and political enemies. The Texan’s tough-guy image so far has been a turnoff to many women; Perot has a serious gender-gap problem. Says a Perot aide: " We’ve got to define Perot before others do it for us.”
The man in line to “let Ross be Ross” is Hal Riney, a fabled San Francisco adman whose credits seem eerily appropriate. They include Ronald Reagan’s 1984 campaign, Bartles & Jaymes wine coolers, Gallo Wines and General Motors’ new Saturn car. Riney’s camera crews, campaign officials confirm, are filming Perot rallies for ads that are likely to air in a few weeks. Perot’s aides are enamored of the Saturn analogy. The car, launched in 1990 by a “clean sheet” GM subsidiary, was built using Japanese principles championed by Perot during his tumultuous tenure at GM. Riney’s Saturn slogan: “A whole new kind of car from a whole new kind of car company.” “Perot’s trying to do the same thing in polities: start over,” says one aide.
The pressure for “specifics” isn’t coming just from hecklers. Clinton, who’s running as Mr. Specific, this week will unveil his own new “urban agenda” and a revamped economic plan, which is likely to include a fairly detailed deficit-reduction package as well as new proposals for taxing foreign companies and increasing spending on training and education. Even some Perot supporters sound impatient. “I’d like to hear more,” says Lionel Kunst, a Kansas City, Kans., businessman who founded a grass-roots group that was one of Perot’s first launching pads. " In a perfect world, I’d like to see him stand up and spell out exactly how everyone will have to sacrifice, from the ‘greedy geezers’ right down the line."
Perot’s people are aware of the problem, but they claim not to be flustered by it. Issues specialists are assembling a package of policy options for Perot. But insiders caution against expecting a Clinton-style white paper soon, if ever. They say Perot has yet to decide his stand on a host of issues, and they refuse to be stampeded by Clinton. " We’re not going to be pushed to respond to him with position papers with 100 points in them," said a top Perot adviser.
Perot will need all his managerial skills to ride herd on the posse of pros he’s assembling. It’s as though Perot’s new managers, Ed Rollins and Hamilton Jordan, scoured frontier saloons for the most grizzled gunslingers. All of them, says one top Perot insider, have been asked in advance to “acknowledge their awe at what’s already happened.” That means they’re supposed to offer advice, but be content with the decisions of Perot and his longtime confidants, lawyer Tom Luce and Perot Systems CEO Mort Meyerson.
The group also has extensive political and business ties of a decidedly insiderish cast. Among the likely roster of advisers and hirees: Republican impresario Joe Canzeri, who “advanced” hundreds of events for Nelson Rockefeller and Ronald Reagan, and who infuriated GOP bigwigs by privately trashing Quayle, with whom he traveled in 1988; Democratic polltaker Paul Maslin, whose clients include Sen. Paul Simon and Democratic Majority Leader George Mitchell; New York admen Scott Miller and David Sawyer, who handled Sen. John Glenn’s 1984 campaign advertising, and Mark Johnson, who was a press aide to ex-Democratic House leaders Jim Wright and Tony Coelho. Some potential recruits, including Rollins and Jordan worked for the New York firm once headed by Sawyer and Miller. Among the firm’s corporate clients: Frank Lorenzo and Eastern Air Lines; Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert; Kohlberg, Kravis and Roberts, and a host of foreign governments.
This is a crew adept at old-fashioned political gamesmanship–and it is finding plenty of opportunities in the disarray of rivals’ camps. Perot’s itinerary in California targeted the voter bases of both of his foes. He held a rally in Orange County, the heart of GOP country. But he also met privately with minority and gay-rights leaders. To the nearly all-white Orange County crowd, Perot preached a message of racial harmony: “We are a nation of many races and creeds,” he said. " Our diversity is a strength, not a weakness." In Denver, Perot was introduced by Calvin Waller, a retired black general who was Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s No. 2 in Desert Storm.
Perhaps not coincidentally, Perot was playing racial peacemaker at the very moment Jesse Jackson and Bill Clinton were locked in a blood feud over Clinton’s criticism of Sister Souljah at a Rainbow Coalition meeting. Jackson told The New York Times that Clinton’s speech had “again exposed a character flaw.” Clinton, not backing down, wondered if Jackson wanted to “stand on the other side of the divide” on race, and hinted that Jackson’s pique had more to do with ego than principle.
While Perot claims to be utterly candid, it was Clinton who won points with many voters, black and white, for his stand against Sister Souljah and for taking on Jackson. " If he can’t denounce her, what’s the use of even having a Democratic Party?" said former Carter press secretary Jody Powell. But some party insiders worried that Clinton had purchased the good notices at a high price: the loss of a peaceful and harmonious send-off at the Democratic convention next month in New York City. “There are other ways to show your guts than by attacking the core Democratic base,” said one Democratic consultant.
Perot’s aides watched and waited to see if they could capitalize on the Jackson-Clinton fight. Jackson and his supporters, backed into a corner, vowed vengeance against Clinton, whom Jackson has yet to endorse. " If it’s distance from us he wants, it’s distance he’ll get," said longtime Jackson aide Frank Watkins. Jackson loyalists already had begun a drive to get him nominated for vice president, and aides appealed to former California governor Jerry Brown to lend his 600 delegates to a platform fight over Jackson’s $600 billion “Rebuild America” proposal for urban aid.
There’s even precedent for a Jackson-Perot alliance. They’ve been phone pals for years and have grandstanded together on education issues and a Middle East hostage-rescue mission in 1985. They have a mutual friend in New York financier Felix Rohatyn, a “Rebuild America” supporter. Perot and Jackson spoke last week–or so the Jackson camp claims. Perot’s top handlers said they knew of no such call. “I don’t want to be part of a dance with Jesse Jackson,” said one aide. But he added that no one is ever sure what calls Perot himself is making, or taking. A deal with Jesse Jackson, though unlikely, isn’t out of the question. After all, there could be nothing more traditional. In this–and every aspect of his campaign–it’s up to Perot to decide how conventional he wants to get.
Gifts of Cab
Everyone but Ross Perot worked the talk-show circuit last week. Some highlights:
CNN “International Hour” Looking both at ease and presidential, Bush stays on safe turf: foreign policy.
“CBS This Morning”
MTV “Choose or Lose "
CNN “Larry King Live " Clinton on MTV: script by no-nonsense post-boomers, score by Aerosmith.
“The Charlie Rose Show "
PBS “MacNeill Lehrer Newshour” Quayle impugns “the cultural elite,” but won’t define it. Like pornography, you know it when you see it.
CNN “Crossfire” Tuesday. NBC “Today” Double dose of the Clinton/ Rainbow feud keeps Jesse primary on front burner.
NBC “Late Night with David Letterman” Top ratings. New Jersey sixth grader is funny, can spell and, thanks to Quayle and NBC, is $200 richer.
