The 33-Day Three-Legged Race

FOR ALL THE COMPLAINTS THAT AMERICAN PRESIdential campaigns are far too long, lingering like a chronic disease over the lion's share of two years, the country has suddenly found itself experimenting -- unexpectedly -- with what amounts to a one-month contest. For it was only last week, with Ross Perot's second coming made official, and with an agreement on televised debates at last achieved, that Campaign '92's full dynamics were in place.

Perot, though much diminished by his quixotic behavior during the summer, managed to manipulate events like a master puppeteer. He invited top advisers of George Bush and Bill Clinton to Dallas, where they pitched their respective candidate's policies to Perot's centurions, some of whom are on his payroll. Three days later, the mercurial billionaire announced that his followers around the country, having found Bush and Clinton wanting, were demanding his active candidacy. Perot twanged that he was "honored to accept their request." Then he introduced his running mate, retired Vice Admiral James Stockdale ("a hero's hero"), and only vaguely alluded to his tough economic recovery plan. As in the initial phase of his campaign, Perot played most heavily on his status as a nonpolitician: "The people want a new political climate where the system does not attract ego-driven, power-hungry people." Whether or not he could fairly exclude himself from that category, his statement was at least in keeping with the season's rhetoric.

Perot's program presumably will get a full airing in the televised debates agreed to at week's end by Clinton's and Bush's agents. There will be three encounters of the three contenders between Oct. 11 and 19. The vice- presidential nominees will meet once, on Oct. 13.

Perot's move and the debate deal prompted a cloudburst of speculation about how they would affect the race. In fact, a plausible scenario could be made for just about any result other than a Perot victory. Never before in the media age has an independent candidate had the money to match the major-party candidates in broadcast advertising. Never before have there been three televised debates so close together. The impact of these firsts cannot yet be calibrated. Together, however, they just might serve to focus attention on important issues, like the economy, rather than on the incessant assaults on character that have marked much of the race so far. It has, after all, been a year of serial surprises. (See Cover Stories beginning on page 34.)