Perot, of course, is no fool. He knows that the “V word”-values-has moved to center stage in presidential politics. It’s a dynamic that predates Perot’s pronouncement (and Dan Quayle’s attack on Murphy Brown) by almost 30 years. Since the tumultuous ’60s, when God was rumored to have died and no parent or societal rule was in favor, presidential elections have been about more than war, the economy and “jobs.” Voters have been drawn to candidates who vow to protect their bedrock values: hard work, discipline and respect for law, order and family. A “family values” appeal can be a divisive, a code-laden spur to white-male fears of blacks or women with power. But the message is legitimate, too, and has gained cachet among baby boomers newly appreciative of age-old values.

Bush has long been expected to run a values campaign. Now he’s got to deliver, and it may be more hard line than he or most of his campaign team wanted. Locked in a three-way race with Perot and Bill Clinton, Bush must energize conservative Republicans, never his biggest fans. With the gulf war fading, the economic recovery pallid and Perot surging, “he’s got no other way to get his core constituencies to the polls,” says conservative author Jeffrey Bell. Law-and-order themes will get a workout, especially in California. So will Bush’s role as commander in chief, not for its foreign-policy connotations but because, in the South especially, the military is as “traditional” as a value can get.

None of that is enough. Bush has no choice but to keep the party’s pro-life plank intact, his advisers reluctantly agree. It may be the only way the president can hold crucial voters-fundamentalist Christians in the South and conservative, “ethnic” Roman Catholics in the North. Three-way math also is a factor. “He’s running against two pro-abortion candidates, Clinton and Perot,” says GOP consultant Craig Shirley. “It would be lunacy to abandon the advantage that comes from the other guys splitting their vote.” But if the Supreme Court further restricts abortion rights this summer, the GOP “Big Tent” could resemble a hand as moderate Republicans flee.

Clinton earnestly believes that government programs can help preserve family values, but seems resigned to a new round of questions about his own. This fusillade, he charges in advance, will be inspired by the GOP. (The last one wasn’t.) " They’ll probably try to do what they normally do: get somebody else to do it for them," he told NEWSWEEK. Clinton has launched what amounts to a sales drive for the saga of his boyhood. The new tack was his wife Hillary’s suggestion. He laces speeches with boyhood recollections of the traditional home of his grandparents in Hope, Ark. He talks more about his daughter, wife and other relatives. He will offer the survival of his once strained marriage as a testament to his commitment to family values. His aides vow to make harsh comparisons with Bush’s “extended families. " “Maybe we’ll start raising some questions about his family,” said one adviser. " Let’s take a look at how they made money.”

Clinton has his own agonizing base" dilemmas to deal with. They are symbolized by the gay vote, the mirror opposite of the pro-life crowd. Clinton says he’s tired of GOP claims that “Democrats are not your kind of people with your kind of values.” But he was struggling to hold off Jerry Brown in the California primary, and the gay vote is crucial in states he must win in the fall. Clinton made one of the most inspirational speeches of his campaign to a gay audience in Los Angeles, and last week he denounced Perot’s views on gays. “That’s not the audience he needs to be spot-lighting as we head into the fall campaign,” fretted one top Democratic strategist. Perot has been making an issue of family values for nearly 40 years. At 25 he asked his congressman to help get him out of the navy because he couldn’t abide the “godless” behavior of his fellow sailors. In business he was Cotton Mather as CEO, dispatching to the stocks any manager found sleeping around. “If a guy got caught he just disappeared,” said Jim Swoben, a former systems analyst and project manager for Perot.

Perot seemed to be having it both ways on family-values issues, courting Republican moderates with his pro-choice stance, forcing Clinton to defend gay rights and offering himself as the acme of social traditionalism. His Orlando, Fla., rally, televised on C-Span last week, was an engagingly homespun affair: one part Amway sales convention, one part revival meeting and 100 percent American corn. But Perot’s evident desire to pry into the lives of his coworkers, past and future, could in the end cost him some votes. Though the word “privacy” doesn’t appear in the Constitution, there’s little doubt that it, too, is a traditional family value.