Three-Ring Circus

By MICHAEL DUFFY WASHINGTON

YOU KNEW SOMETHING HAD TO give when George Bush started arguing with a 6- ft.chicken. For nearly a month, the President's men had been stiff-arming the dates and format proposed by a bipartisan debate commission and endorsed by Bill Clinton. The challenger was scoring political points by declaring that his opponent was afraid to face him man-to-man. Bush's charges of tax-and- spend liberalism, like his aggressive attacks on Clinton's draft record, were unable to dent the Democrat's double-digit lead in the polls. But when the Clinton forces began infiltrating Bush rallies with workers dressed in yellow-feathered chicken costumes and armed with signs reading WHY WON'T CHICKEN GEORGE DEBATE?, the President lost his cool.

"You talking about the draft-record chicken or are you talking about the chicken in the Arkansas River?" Bush asked one plumed heckler last week. "Which one are you talking about? Which one? Get out of here. Maybe it's the draft? Is that what's bothering you?"

The bird's answer is unrecorded. But on Thursday, the man who had been / written off as "the yellow Ross of Texas" -- billionaire businessman Ross Perot -- ruffled a few feathers of his own by dramatically re-entering the race he quit on July 16. The next day, the logjam over debates burst as negotiators for the Bush and Clinton camps announced that three presidential face-offs and one vice-presidential meeting would take place between Sunday, Oct. 11, and Monday, Oct. 19.

A lightning bolt of uncertainty had crashed into a campaign that was shaping up as a likely Democratic blowout. Suddenly, the battle between a flagging incumbent and his brash young challenger was transformed into a weird tag-team contest in which the newcomer might join forces with one man against the other -- or beat up on both of them simultaneously. And the complicated debate calculus that had been at the center of weeks of negotiations was skewed by the prospect of an unprecedented three-way debate.

No one expects Perot to win the election -- a CNN/Gallup poll taken the day before his re-entry gave the Texan only 7%, against 35% for Bush and 52% for Clinton -- but he has the potential to swing some key states into one column or the other and thus influence the electoral vote tally. Given Clinton's commanding lead, it is possible that Perot's reappearance act will have no effect on the outcome. But it offered the Republicans an unexpected break and a chance to beat the odds. "The race wasn't going anywhere for us," said a Bush campaign official. "Now we have a window of opportunity to change their minds. It is not a guarantee, but it is at least an opening for us."

Nothing holds as much potential for Bush as the string of debates beginning this Sunday. The unprecedented schedule -- four 90-minute debates crammed into a nine-day period -- is the result of an argument, oddly sympathetic to Bush, that the Clinton camp made in the final hours of negotiations between the two campaigns last week. Clinton's seconds wanted fewer, and immediate, debates in order to cement more quickly the public's general preference for the Arkansas Governor. Bush's team wanted to string the debates over a longer period of time to give the incumbent a better chance to jostle the electorate's dim view of his performance in office -- and allow for a last-minute Clinton error. But Clinton's team insisted that the embattled Bush could make his case more effectively in a highly concentrated manner. After initially balking at the argument, the Bush team finally agreed. "At first," said a Bush negotiator, % "we would have preferred to stretch it out. But the Clinton people said that any impact we would have would quickly peter out, and our team came to believe that might be true." Added a Clinton counterpart: "Doing the debates fast ended up being in both sides' interests for totally different reasons." Both camps split the difference on format, agreeing to one debate before a panel of journalists, another before journalists and a single moderator, and a third led by a moderator with questions taken from the audience. The vice presidential debate will have a single moderator.

The big mystery was why Perot was rejoining a contest that was likely to cost him tens of millions of dollars with no chance of victory. Part of the answer -- perhaps the whole answer -- was ego gratification. When he abruptly quit the race in July rather than face probing questions about his background, business dealings and family matters, his reputation nosedived. Perot received hundreds of little looking glasses in the mail from angry supporters who demanded that he "look himself in the mirror." The backlash shamed the proud Texan. "His worst nightmare was to go down in history as a quitter," said an ex-associate. "It was a burr under his saddle that he couldn't stand -- he had to get it under control."

Like some kind of political cryogenicist, Perot kept his campaign in suspended animation after July, spending $4 million in August to keep offices open and volunteers on board. Meanwhile, he published an economic plan -- composed largely by a team of graduate students -- that made it to the best-seller list, thanks partly to mass purchases by Perot's own field operatives. That plan, a drastic deficit-reducing blueprint, provided the foundation stone for Perot's subsequent claims that neither major candidate was addressing the issues.

TWO WEEKS AGO, PEROT ADMITted that his withdrawal had been "a mistake," signaling his intention to rejoin the race. His requests that state coordinators meet with delegations from the Clinton and Bush campaigns in Dallas last week and then canvass the volunteers on whether he should run were regarded as mere formalities. On the one hand, the Perotistas criticized the Clinton envoys for promising to use income generated by upper-income tax hikes to cut middle-class taxes rather than reduce the deficit. On the other hand, the volunteers found the Bush team vague on entitlement cuts and short on evidence to support their claim to drastic deficit reduction in five years. + Perhaps the strangest point of the meetings came when Jack Kemp, the excitable Housing Secretary famous for abandoning Bush whenever the urge hits him, bounded to his feet and exclaimed, "Run, Ross! Run, Ross, and let the chips fall where they may."

When Perot formally announced his candidacy last Thursday, he insisted that he was getting back in because "the volunteers in all 50 states have asked me." Betraying a striking ignorance of how he is now perceived by the general public, he later said, "The people want a new political climate, where the system does not attract ego-driven, power-hungry people." Perot's brief appearance before the press gave his supporters little reason for optimism. His brusque handling of a few questions -- "Just have fun, get raises and bonuses, play gotcha. I don't care," he snapped at reporters -- revealed that the distemper that drove him from the race three months ago will hamper his path to redemption.

But the Texan is not likely to hold many press conferences. His campaign strategy will focus on national television -- not only on shows like Larry King Live, whose softball questions and free airtime inflated the Perot bubble in the first place, but also on large amounts of paid advertising. He has already committed a million dollars to buy half-hour blocks of network television time this week.

Will that be enough to rekindle the support that actually had Perot leading in some polls last spring? Highly doubtful. Surveys conducted by the Clinton camp agree with a published poll showing that nearly three-quarters of Americans now have no intention of voting for Perot; Bush's aides peg Perot's support at no more than 14%.

Clinton says he won't change his strategy to contend with Perot's return. That's partly bravado talking: Perot may make it somewhat easier for Bush to win in the Deep South as well as in some of the more closely fought battleground states, such as New Jersey, Michigan and Pennsylvania. However, Perot does put Clinton closer to victory in some Western states and may even tip Texas and its 32 electoral votes into the Clinton camp. As one Bush official put it, "By and large, Perot is a wash, a net nothing. It doesn't close the current gap or change the numbers in our favor."

In an effort to narrow the gap, the Bush team last week aired two advertisements criticizing the Governor as a high-tax waffler whose economics "you can't trust." One spot portrays real middle-income Americans -- a steam fitter, a scientist, two sales representatives and a housing lender -- whose taxes supposedly would be raised by as much as $2,072 under Clinton's plan. It turned out that the Bush team had calculated the figures by totting up the numbers in Clinton's economic plan and then making up the shortfall in revenues with higher income taxes.

Clinton was so furious at the Bush attack ad that he instantly ordered up a counterattack that will air next week. But a separate Clinton ad unveiled last week made the politically unrealistic claim that Bush would give millionaires a $108,000 tax cut -- a figure derived by assuming that Congress would adopt Bush's capital-gains tax-cut proposal, which it has repeatedly killed. Clinton pronounced himself relieved that the counterpunching had begun. "We're at the body-contact stage of the campaign," he said late one night last week aboard his campaign plane, "and I like that."

Clinton will soon begin one-on-one practice debates against Robert Barnett, a Washington attorney who has played Bush in Democratic warm-up sessions since 1984, when Geraldine Ferraro debated the former Vice President. Barnett plans to show up at the first session this week wearing a rubber Bush mask, a Kennebunkport sweatshirt and a big red "Second Place" ribbon. (No Perot surrogate has been chosen.) The first challenge for Clinton's debate coaches will be to curb the Governor's habit of talking in lists and giving flat, six- part answers. "The smartest thing ever said in the history of the world," admits Clinton strategist James Carville, "is, 'We've met the enemy, and he is us.' "

Bush will go several rounds this week with Budget Director Richard Darman, who played Michael Dukakis during practice sessions in 1988. But in public Bush is working just as hard to roll back expectations with the line, "I'm no Oxford debater." Bush doesn't enjoy debates and has trouble keeping his mind, as well as his arms and hands, from wandering. But he can be a feisty interlocutor, who makes up with grit and heart what he lacks in forensic style. Bush's coaches, moreover, believe Perot's presence on the debate stage works to their advantage: the spectacle of Perot and Clinton ganging up on the Commander in Chief, they say, will generate "sympathy" for the incumbent. "Bush," as an aide put it, "will be able to more easily look presidential."

Nonetheless, it is ironic that after 30 years in public life and nearly four years in the Oval Office, Bush must now rely on the return of a man he despises -- Ross Perot -- and a sport he has never liked nor excelled at -- debating -- to help salvage his political career.

With reporting by Priscilla Painton with Clinton, Walter Shapiro/New York and Richard Woodbury/Dallas