Angry Voters See Perot Riding in Like Cavalry : Campaign: Texas billionaire strikes a chord with petitioners weary of the usual political roundup.

The people who call on the telephone are angry. And they will do anything they can to persuade H. Ross Perot to run for President.

The people who walk into the offices of the Perot Petition Committee say they have no alternative. President Bush has wrecked the economy, they say, and the likely Democratic alternative, Bill Clinton, is flawed.

The obstacles to a Perot candidacy are Gargantuan, but this does not faze his enthusiasts. In the tough-talking Texas billionaire, they see an American folk hero with the brains, the guts and the instinct for the bottom line that are needed to rejuvenate America.

“I just believe we’re in a sad state of affairs in this country and the leadership is not getting the job done,” said Joe Odom, a curly haired warehouseman for the Procter & Gamble Corp. “It is like the latter days of Rome.”

Perot has said he will run for President as an independent only if “ordinary people” want him badly enough to place his name on the ballot in all 50 states.

It is an audacious challenge, egotistical perhaps, but not out of character for the gritty, 61-year-old former salesman who founded a $2.5-billion computer services company, went to bat for American prisoners in Hanoi and Tehran, and survived a boardroom brawl with General Motors Chairman Roger B. Smith.

Perot’s fans want to make it happen. Last week, folks like Odom were dropping by the “draft Perot” offices on the second floor of a mirrored tower in North Dallas to add their names to petitions that would get his name on the Texas ballot in November.

Calls were pouring in from around the country at the rate of 2,000 an hour, swamping the 100 telephone lines. Volunteers were taking down names, addresses and phone numbers to be entered into a computer data bank, and promising to send ballot instructions specific to the caller’s state.

“I guess that I’m typical in that I am fed up with the current political setup and the lack of choice for President,” said Wayne Snow, a Miami, Okla., salesman who stopped by to pick up a ballot petition while driving through Dallas.

“I think our system is corrupt from Bush on down,” Snow said. “I think things have to get bad before people get out and do something about it. And now they’re that bad.”

Never mind conventional political wisdom, which says that a jug-eared political novice--even an industrial titan with a fortune ranked 21st in the nation by Forbes magazine--may be asked to visit the White House but is unlikely to be invited for a permanent stay.

Never mind the history of independent and third-party candidates, which ranks somewhere between pathetic and disastrous.

And never mind this nation’s two-party tradition, which dictates that even if Perot catches fire in this politically restless spring, Americans in November will be ill-inclined to “throw their vote away” on him.

The Perot for President movement is, in the end, not about politics. It is about the old American yearning for a populist cowboy on a white horse who will gallop into town, round up all the rascals, ride corruption out and return control to the people.

“We own this country; the guys in Washington work for us,” Perot repeatedly says in the interviews and appearances that have helped spark the draft movement.

Politicians are our servants, but are behaving like “kings and emperors” at taxpayer expense, because we let them, Perot argues. Americans have become “absentee owners,” who have stopped taking personal responsibility for making the nation work, he chides.

Perot for President is also about the perennial quest to restore the nation to its righteous place as a shining city on a hill--or, in the anxious spirit of 1992, at least to keep America at the top of the economic heap.

“We’ve got to out-think, out-invent and out-produce our international business competitors . . . “ Perot exhorts. “We’ve got to be economically strong to be a force for good throughout the world. . . . We can be a shining beacon to the rest of the world whose best days are in the future.”

Like Republican Patrick J. Buchanan and Democrat Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., the two protest candidates that have emerged from the major parties this season, Perot has pitched his ideological tent far away from Washington.

The city “has become a town filled with sound bites, shell games, handlers and media stuntmen who posture, create images and talk, shoot off Roman candles but don’t ever accomplish anything,” Perot said Wednesday in a speech to the National Press Club.

And although Perot is easily as combative as Buchanan and as iconoclastic as Brown, his folksy style and his East Texas twang seem to mute any vitriol.

“The folks in the Congress and the White House, in my judgment, are not villains on this whole economic situation,” he said. “They just don’t know what to do. Most of them are either lawyers or career politicians. They don’t understand business, so they just stand there frozen, worrying about their images, taking polls, bouncing personal checks and raising money from foreign lobbyists as the economy deteriorates.”

And though he clearly delights in tough talk, his message is also inclusive.

“We’re divided by racial strife. I just hate this . . .,” Perot said in his Wednesday speech. “We’re a melting pot, right? OK, we ought to love one another. That takes care of most of us. . . . You’ve got a few hard-core haters. My advice to them is just pretty simple and blunt: Nobody is going to leave the country. Nobody is going anywhere. We’re stuck with one another. . . . Let’s get along. . . . “

Some of Perot’s proposals smack of the slash-and-burn conservatism of Ronald Reagan. He told the National Press Club he would shrink the federal government, gut the White House, Cabinet and congressional staffs, and push for line-item budget veto power for the President, in part so that Bush would “stop whining about it.”

But other Perot positions cut against the conservative grain. He thinks a woman must make her own decision on abortion. He advocates tougher gun control. He would ban political action committees from contributing to political campaigns.

In the best anti-Establishment tradition, he would prohibit former federal employees from “revolving door” lobbying for five years after leaving office and ax all “freebies and perks” for both Congress and Cabinet officials. He would even make the vice president fly on commercial airlines.

Perot worries most about a federal debt that has quadrupled from $1 trillion when Reagan took office in 1981 to $4 trillion today.

“Can we agree that going $4 trillion into debt did not create utopia?” he asked the press club.

“Politicians are buying votes with our children’s money,” he told interviewer David Gergen. It’s a message that appeals to Dallas financial consultant Lee Sullivan, who came by the Perot for President office last week to pick up a stack of petitions. Sullivan can’t sign one himself because he voted in the Republican primary on March 10.

In order to place an independent presidential candidate on the ballot in Texas, Perot’s supporters must collect signatures from 54,275 people who did not vote in either primary. Their deadline is May 11.

Sullivan plans to circulate petitions among friends and associates. He says politicians are not taking their job seriously and Americans have been too docile. “Now is the time to change that,” he said, leading his two small children out the door.

Whether Perot generates a groundswell remains to be seen, but he definitely has been running up the telephone bills of supporters. Ever since he told television interviewer Larry King last month that he would consider a draft, the phones at Perot Systems, his new computer services company, have been ringing incessantly. He added four secretaries, but the lines were still clogged.

On March 12, he took space in the building where his own offices are located and installed 30 telephones, which still were not enough. By last Wednesday, the whole operation had to be moved to another floor to make room for 100 telephone lines and volunteers.

“We were answering 2,000 calls an hour yesterday,” Sharon Holman, a Perot employee supervising the volunteers, said Friday.

The voter dismay and even disgust that Perot seems to be tapping are hardly new features on the American political landscape. But they may loom larger than at any time since the post-Watergate election of 1974.

The U.S. House’s check scandal claimed at least one congressional incumbent in last week’s Illinois Democratic primary, and more such defeats are expected. Polls have consistently shown that a significant fraction of voters think poorly of both Bush and Clinton and wish someone else would enter the presidential race.

“There is so much anger that there does seem to be a new political reality this year,” said Leslie H. Southwick, deputy assistant attorney general and author of the book “Presidential Also-Rans and Running Mates.”

“I wouldn’t bet the farm on anything this year except that those who appear as outsiders are going to have an overwhelming advantage,” he said.

Yet Southwick and others note that Bush looked invulnerable just a year ago, and they predict an economic turnaround could melt voter discontent just as quickly. Even those who cast protest ballots in the primaries are unlikely to “throw their vote away” on an independent in the fall, said Stephen Hess, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington.

“It’s one thing to vote for Pat Buchanan in New Hampshire when you know he’s not going to win and hope it’s going to wake up George Bush,” Hess said. “It’s another thing to vote for H. Ross Perot when you know the President is going to be named Bush or Clinton.”

Added William Moore, a specialist in third-party campaigns at the College of Charleston in South Carolina, “If (Perot) gets on the ballot, the question will be not ‘Will he win?’ but ‘Which major candidate will he hurt?’ ”

Moore concludes that Perot would hurt Bush the most, especially if he is seen as “the protest candidate of individualism” in the Southwest and West. Perot could certainly be a factor in Texas, which ranks third in electoral votes with 32.

The last independent candidate for President was John B. Anderson, a 20-year House member from Illinois who launched his bid after losing the 1980 Republican presidential nomination to Reagan. He won just 6.7% of the vote in November.

Anderson said Friday that he believes voters are even more disaffected now than they were during his bid for the presidency, when the “misery index” had soared, President Jimmy Carter’s popularity had plummeted and many deemed Reagan too “kooky right” to be President.

“There’s more fear of the future,” said Anderson. “It’s been said over and over again, and it’s almost a cliche, but now even people who are employed . . . say, ‘I could be next.’ ”

Perot told the Los Angeles Times on Thursday that he plans to name a running mate within a week because ballot laws in some states require early listing of the vice presidential candidate. Anderson, who put surrogates on the ballot and did not select his own running mate until August, said such an early choice would be “foolish.”

“He’s got to establish his own bona fides as a candidate before he proceeds to the next step,” Anderson said.

One of Anderson’s major handicaps was a lack of funds--a problem not shared by Perot, who has vowed to spend up to $100 million or “whatever it takes” to finance a campaign. Perot also has top-drawer financial credentials at a time when skillful management of the nation’s ailing economy is seen as crucial.

On the other hand, Perot is unskilled in the art of politics and is liable to take some tumbles, said Fred Meyer, the Texas Republican Party chief.

“When someone hasn’t had experience in the public arena, you shortly make some mistakes,” Meyer said. “You step in some bear traps.”

Over the years, Perot has managed to get himself in and out of several figurative bear traps. On the eve of the Persian Gulf War, for example, he launched what amounted to a one-man campaign against the U.S. incursion into Kuwait and Iraq.

It was vintage Perot, embracing what at the time was an unpopular stance and trying to sway the public.

Perot has never avoided tough fights. In the mid-1980s, he was asked by then Gov. Mark White to spearhead a drive for education reform in Texas. Facing seemingly impossible odds, he personally financed lobbying efforts on behalf of the reform. The result was a restructuring of the Texas school system which included academic standards that students had to meet to participate in sports or other extracurricular activities.

Perot’s life provides ample material for campaign flyers: A boyhood in Texarkana, Tex., making extra money busting broncs and delivering the local newspaper; a father who took his black employees to the county fair every year, giving each one his calling card to show if they encountered any trouble; a mother who told her son not to rub out a mark that told hobos the Perot home was an easy touch for food.

He won an appointment to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, where he was twice class president, and spent years at sea in the Navy. He was a top salesman at IBM Corp., but he was bored because it was too easy.

In 1962, Perot founded the Electronic Data Systems Corp. with $1,000. He sold it to General Motors in 1984 for $2.5 billion and a seat on the GM board of directors. But he quickly rankled the auto giant’s brass with his straight talk about the company’s inefficiency. In December, 1986, the board members paid Perot $750 million to give up his stock and stop tormenting them--a deal that Perot branded “morally wrong” and that infuriated stockholders.

During the Vietnam War, he tried to fly in 26 tons of food and Christmas packages to Hanoi for American prisoners of war. Later, he staged a parade in San Francisco for returning veterans, who he believed were being treated shamefully by the American public.

In 1979, he organized a commando unit that rescued two of his employees from a Tehran prison during the opening stages of the Iranian revolution in 1979, a feat chronicled in the book and miniseries “On Wings of Eagles.”

Perot may have offered the most telling comment about himself in 1986, when Britain’s Prince Charles flew to Dallas to present him with the Winston Churchill Foundation leadership award.

In his acceptance speech, Perot said he had once dreamed of being a pearl in an oyster. But then, he said, he realized that his role in life was to be the piece of sand that irritates the oyster and produces the pearl.

Efron reported from Washington and Kennedy from Dallas.