Tricky George vs. Inspector Perot

By MICHAEL DUFFY WASHINGTON

George Bush hates to attack his political rivals. Character assassination is so unseemly a business that the courtly President relies on others to do it for him. "How come nobody is taking on Ross Perot?" he asked in frustration at a White House meeting in early June. Informed that a frontal attack on the Texas billionaire could backfire with the resentful public, Bush replied, "Well, dammit, if no one else is gonna do it, I will."

But not without a sympathetic pretext to protect him. So, when the Washington Post detailed Perot's considerable record of investigating people, including Bush himself, the President jumped at the opportunity. Seizing on reporters' misinformed suggestions that Perot had investigated Bush's children, the President described Perot's habit as not "particularly American." In an interview with ABC's 20/20 taped later, Bush inflated the charge: "If he was having my children investigated, that is beyond the pale. Leave my kids alone, I say."

Never mind that the Post story did not suggest any such thing. Never mind, too, that Perot received a thank-you note from Bush in late 1986 after he passed along some harmless gossip about the Bush kids. What mattered was that Bush had found a way to throw the wily Perot on the defensive. "The public found out," said Robert Teeter, Bush's campaign chairman, that Perot "is not the kind of person who has the character, the judgment and the temperament to be President."

The public also learned once more what Bush meant when he said he would "do what he had to do" to win re-election. Perot released the handwritten Christmas Eve note from Bush a day later and said he had intervened only "as one father to another." Perot then charged, "There has been a 90-day effort to redefine my personality by a group called Opposition Research of the Republican Party . . .They're generally known as the dirty-tricks crowd . . . This was a carefully thought-out and carefully executed effort to try to damage my candidacy." And that, said Perot, "is what's wrong with American politics."

In the first real mudslinging match between the two, the Bush campaign $ nearly pressed the attack too far. Rich Bond, the Republican Party chairman, was everywhere last week, accusing Perot of being too dangerous to trust with "the CIA, the FBI and the IRS." This alarming charge oozed hypocrisy, coming on the heels of news that Bush had asked Perot as recently as January 1990 to underwrite the rebuilding of Panama after the U.S. invasion. Bond nonetheless barreled on, even dialing up Larry King Live to engage Perot in a lengthy argument about the definition of a "dirty trick."

Bush's network of family and family retainers also piled on. Presidential press secretary Marlin Fitzwater said Perot's "paranoia knows no bounds," while drug czar Bob Martinez labeled Perot "not fit to be President." Casting off her grandmotherly pose, Barbara Bush called Perot's behavior "bizarre" and traced his ire at her husband to the fact that Bush had spurned a job offer from Perot 25 years ago. By the end of the week, Vice President Dan Quayle was referring to the diminutive Texan as "Inspector Perot."

If the doubts about Perot were deepened by the Bush onslaught, it is because the undeclared candidate does have a bit of Sam Spade in him. There is no evidence that Perot ever investigated Bush's children or his own, apart from asking a private eye to track down a family heirloom that was stolen from his son while in college. But Perot admitted that on "two or three occasions" he employed detectives to investigate business associates who were suspected of financial impropriety. He also admitted paying a Washington law firm $10,000 to find out why the Pennzoil Co., chaired by a onetime business partner of Bush's, was able to deduct $48 million in federal taxes over several years for donating 100,000 acres of a New Mexico ranch to the U.S. Forest Service in 1982.

To hear Perot tell it, he is merely the coincidental repository of dirt on his enemies dredged up by others. He insisted that he poked into two Bush real estate transactions only at the request of the Washington Post. But the Post maintains that Perot "volunteered" to do the digging.

Either way, by raising such doubts, the Bush camp has found a way to slow down, temporarily at least, Perot's runaway train. "It's done," said a senior adviser to the Bush campaign. "Perot is now defined, and he is more than just quirky and eccentric. What we have to do now is drive a wedge in there and cleave away from Perot's core support those voters who are independents and Republicans."

| Perot's advisers concede that he must erase the doubts soon. His challenge is to prove that whatever risks he poses as President are outweighed by the grease he can bring to bear on the gridlock in Washington. Perot's counterpunching was for the most part effective. But the result of the name- calling was no net gain for either Bush or Perot. Meanwhile, as his opponents pummeled away at each other, Democrat Bill Clinton chortled, hoping, perhaps, that the two front runners would diminish themselves enough to give him a slim chance in the fall.