Perot Calls in the Pros

By MICHAEL DUFFY 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 caring 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 Republican, 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.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 974 registered voters taken for TIME/CNN on June 3-4 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3.1%

CAPTION: If the election for President were held today, would you vote for Bush, Clinton or Perot?

, If the election for President were held today, would you vote for Bush or Clinton?

Does President Bush deserve to be re-elected?

With reporting by Dan Goodgame/Washington