Politics 1-800-Pound Guerrillas

By WALTER SHAPIRO

Call it the Touch-Tone Rebellion, the Phone P-for-Protest Uprising or the 800-Number Insurrection.

Just six months ago, a mad-as-hell voter enraged at the mess in Washington and disgusted by compromising politicians in both parties would phone his favorite radio-talk-show host to vent his throw-the-bums-out spleen. Now that same populist rage is dialing right into the political system -- right into the volatile center of the 1992 presidential race -- and mainstream politicians from Bill Clinton to George Bush are all but cursing the invention of toll-free telephone numbers.

Jerry Brown, the flamed-out former California Governor, derided by Democratic insiders as a flake, a fake, a maverick and a mountebank, regained political legitimacy last week by edging out Clinton 37% to 36% in the Connecticut primary. "It's a miracle," Brown proclaimed. "It's not about me. It's about the grass roots rising up against the bounced checks, the congressional pay raises, the corrupt status quo."

Brown's amazing resurrection is linked to his small-contributions-only 800 number, which has kept his ascetic, spare-couches-and-coach-seats crusade alive with $3.5 million in pledges and $2 million in actual contributions. Brown may be only the vessel of protest against big-money politics and Clinton's too-slick-for-his-own-good image. But after months lost in what Brown calls "the dark hole of media nonexistence," he is suddenly running nearly even in the Clinton campaign's private polls handicapping the decisive April 7 New York primary.

Yet the new king of phone-call frenzy is neither an insurgent Democrat like Brown nor a Republican conservative like the fast-fading Pat Buchanan. That honor belongs instead to billionaire Texas businessman H. Ross Perot, who positions himself as a modern-day Cincinnatus called from the boardroom by the little people clamoring for him to mount an independent campaign for the White House. In what may be the cleverest antipolitics fandango in an antipolitics year, Perot insists, "I have no desire to be President. My personal feelings are, anybody intelligent enough to be able to do the job would not want the toughest, dirtiest, most thankless job in the world."

With instant credibility that comes from the biggest political bankroll since Nelson Rockefeller, Perot boasts his own 800 number, which was flashed on the screen during an appearance on the Phil Donahue Show. The response was so intense last week (Perot partisans claimed 500,000 calls in a 24-hour period)* that the fledgling campaign had to obtain 1,100 extra phone lines from the Home Shopping Network. What Perot is asking for is not money but commitment. He has said he will run only if his supporters circulate petitions and navigate the election laws to get him on the ballot in all 50 states. With petition deadlines in states like Texas just six weeks away, the obstacles are formidable but far from impossible, especially with enough money.

A Perot campaign would revolve more around person than policy and would test whether the American voters buy the notion of sending someone with no experience in national government or politics to shake up the way Washington works. (If Perot's candidacy were a movie, the title might be Daddy Warbucks Goes to Washington.) But such speculation is premature: Perot might not run, his record might not survive public scrutiny, he may prove a maladroit campaigner, and his damn-the-torpedoes style may not sit well with voters. Still, the Bush camp, having already survived third-party threats from Buchanan and hatemonger David Duke, is taking Perot very seriously indeed. "There is contingency planning going on," says a senior Bush campaign adviser. "In places we need to win, like Pennsylvania and Texas, he could be a pain in the butt."

In past political seasons, there have been moments when it looked as if the structure of traditional two-party politics would finally collapse under the weight of too many 30-second attack ads, too many sound bites, too many backroom handlers, too much voter apathy and too many dispiriting November choices between candidates who inspire more cynicism than commitment. These interludes pass, which is why it is tempting to dismiss the latest manifestations of anti-Establishment sentiment as a short-term aberration. The Connecticut Democratic primary, after all, was highly unrepresentative: the turnout was low, the voters were angry, and local favorite Paul Tsongas had just withdrawn from the race. (In a clear rebuff to Clinton, the former Massachusetts Senator received 20% of the vote.) Still, there are contrary signs that suggest that 1992 will be far from a normal political campaign. A Harris poll at the end of last year found that voter alienation was at a 25- year peak. Turnout in primaries is even lower than usual, and much of the stay-at-home electorate may be too bitter to bother to vote in November. The recession is seen as a talisman of America's long-term economic decline, rather than just as a cyclical downturn. The House-bank scandal underscores the impression that Congress is mired in corruption. "There's something out there of major significance," says University of Texas political scientist Walter Dean Burnham. "Thank God we're not a culture that produces Fuhrer figures very easily. Because the underlying conditions that do that are in the process of being formed."

Send-them-a-message candidates like Brown -- and Buchanan in the early going -- have found fertile soil in the primaries largely because there are legitimate reasons for public-spirited voters to protest. Bush may win re- election, but little in the campaign is likely to be an endorsement of his handling of domestic affairs. On the Democratic side, Clinton and Brown are the embodiment of the ancient Greek maxim of the fox and the hedgehog. Clinton, the fox, knows many things well: his policy positions on a wide range of issues are thoughtful and often innovative. But Brown, like the hedgehog, knows just one important thing: the current system of multimillion-dollar political fund raising is inherently corrupting to democracy. Brown -- who, even his fondest admirers admit, is a political changeling constantly taking on new personas -- has finally embraced a cause that returns him to his political roots as a post-Watergate clean-government crusader in California.

It is hard to believe that less than two months ago, five Democratic contenders were conducting a civics-book campaign in New Hampshire, rising to the occasion as the voters earnestly debated the fine print in their policy proposals. But then cynicism kicked in as the candidates were forced to adapt to the destructive realities of too many primaries demanding too much money for too many negative ads. Desperate to know the candidates, all that the voters in the 15 March primary states heard was the irritating static of petty politicians sniping at each other with exaggerated charges and counterclaims.

With Tsongas out of the race, ire set in when Democrats, with more than half the delegates yet to be chosen, were deprived of the one thing they craved: a real choice. Democratic leaders deserve some of the blame for artificially stacking too many primaries around Super Tuesday to create an early consensus. By tinkering with the rules, the Democrats fell victim yet again to the law of unintended consequences: Clinton was anointed as the de facto nominee before most Democrats were comfortable with him. Little known before the campaign began, Clinton is now being defined by Brown's sound bites, his own blunders, like golfing at a segregated country club, and the work of investigative reporters delving into the less savory aspects of his record in Arkansas.

Last week Clinton was jolted by a New York Times story alleging that he had helped remove a provision in a tough 1988 state ethics code that would have forced disclosure of potential conflicts of interest in his wife Hillary's law firm. The Clinton campaign issued a detailed rebuttal, and a spokesman claimed "misrepresentation on the part of the New York Times."

The obvious beneficiary is Brown -- Public Enemy No. 1 for Establishment Democrats -- who inherits a larger platform than he might otherwise deserve. The former California Governor's shrill attacks on Clinton as the "scandal a week" candidate of complacent political insiders led the customarily neutral / party chairman, Ron Brown, to denounce the candidate's "scorched-earth policy" of verbally assaulting the Democratic front runner. Snapped Jerry Brown: "I think it is understandable that ((Ron Brown)) becomes overzealous in his protection of the old order."

As a protest candidate, Brown has so far avoided the scrutiny routinely applied to other contenders. He speaks in metaphors rather than in the nuts- and-bolts details of position papers. Early in the campaign, he did not even have an economic policy -- "That's coming, we're working on it," he used to say, before returning to decrying the corruption of the status quo. His most innovative proposal -- a 13% flat tax coupled with a 13% value-added tax -- is in its way reminiscent of Reaganomics, beguiling on the surface save for the awkward problem that the numbers do not add up. Liberal critics persuasively claim that Brown's regressive plan would raise the tax burden of lower-income Americans while cutting it in half or those who earn more than $567,000.

Unburdened by an excess of specifics, Brown can dance away from criticism with a disarming and alarming hey-it's-only-politics admission of error. Challenged last week on his support for the Bush Administration's controversial ban on fetal-tissue research, Brown displayed a sound-bite-deep understanding of the issue. Asked for the basis of his position, he confessed, "Well, you get asked these questions and you have to answer real quick." In his meeting with TIME editors last week, Brown dodged and wove through an imprecise discourse on energy, the economy and global competition before adding with implacable logic, "I have pilot-tested most of the political programs. I know which ones work and which don't." That remark harks back to Brown's hidden strength -- he has been there, through eight years as California Governor and two prior presidential campaigns. His governing style was not too much different from his current posture as a candidate: innovative, intense, intuitive and sometimes incoherent. A Brown win in next week's New York primary would halt Clinton's march to the nomination and trigger a frenzied effort by party regulars to find, somehow, another candidate.

Despite the two men's different backgrounds, there are odd affinities between Brown and Perot. Both live outside the normal realities of campaign finance: Brown because he can live on so little, and Perot because he has so much. They are both influenced by the same political guru, Pat Caddell, the former Democrat wunderkind who has been shunned by frontline presidential candidates since he advised Joseph Biden in 1987. Caddell sounds almost as if he is reciting Perot's script when he declares, "The thunder coming out of Texas is the thunder not of a third party but ((of)) an alternative to business-as-usual Washington politics."

But America, despite the current ferment and frustration, remains bound to a two-party system. A fall campaign between Bush and, presumably, Clinton may not send the adrenaline racing, but it will not have to degenerate into a lowest-common-denominator sound-bite sweepstakes. The appeal of Brown and Perot -- and Tsongas and, yes, even Buchanan earlier -- is a reminder that large groups of voters in both parties, along with the disaffected at home, long for something more than they are being offered. If mainstream political leaders cannot speak to the nation's restless uncertainty about the future, then both parties have no one to blame but themselves if they face a full- scale voter rebellion.

FOOTNOTE: *Up from the 6,000 calls Perot claims he received only 13 days earlier. If that rate of increase continues, by April 20 Perot will have been phoned by every man, woman and child in the U.S. -- 13 times.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Voter Research & Surveys, Connecticut Primary exit-poll results}]CAPTION: HOW BROWN WON CONNECTICUT

With reporting by Jordan Bonfante with Brown, Michael Duffy/Washington and Richard Woodbury/Houston