Perot’s Swift Rise Draws GOP, Democrat Broadsides : Politics: Attacks by senior officials reflect fear that his bid for the presidency will not fade with the summer.

White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, reflecting GOP alarm over the strength of Ross Perot’s independent presidential bid, warns that a vote for him would be supporting “a pig in the poke and a dangerous and destructive personality.”

The Texas billionaire’s refusal to spell out his positions on major issues has made it difficult for both party campaigns to criticize him, Fitzwater said in an interview, “but being afraid of the unknown may soon make people ask, ‘What kind of monster are we buying here?’ ”

Meantime, House GOP Leader Bob Michel (R-Ill.), in what looked like an orchestrated attack, Thursday described Perot’s rise as frightening and told a Republican breakfast group that Perot’s message that “democracy isn’t working” has been heard often and is “sometimes sinister and sometimes just silly.”

Reflecting Democratic concern about the new challenger, a senior official of Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton’s campaign, who declined to be identified, predicted “the time will come when Perot will be in the arena and have to say what he would do as President and he’s kind of a fraud.”

Once dismissed as a political oddity or at most a spoiler, Henry Ross Perot has soared so high and so fast in voters’ eyes that Republican and Democratic strategists alike now fear that--contrary to the conventional wisdom about independent presidential candidates--he is not a summer sensation who will fade away as the campaign wears on.

Unless they can find a way to stop him, strategists in both parties say, Perot could win the White House outright or at least throw this year’s presidential election into the House of Representatives.

As the harsh comments by Fitzwater, Michel and the Clinton aide indicate, the effort to slow Perot’s momentum has begun in earnest. Never before have senior officials in either party attacked Perot so directly or sought openly to discredit him.

“I take Perot extremely seriously--Perot as Perot or Perot as he may represent the none-of-the-above yearning of 25% or more of the electorate,” said a Bush adviser and senior Republican official.

The GOP official, who asked not to be identified because “it doesn’t serve George Bush’s purpose for me to tangle with this guy publicly,” called Perot “a force unto himself.” He added that Perot “makes it difficult for both Bush and Clinton.”

If he receives under 15% of the vote he theoretically helps Clinton, because virtually all of Perot’s strength at that level would be coming from Republican-leaning groups, according to this official. If he levels out at about 25% of the vote, he helps Bush’s reelection because he would be drawing heavily from Clinton as well as Bush voters. But if he goes beyond 35%, “he could win or throw it in the House,” the official said.

Michel also raised the prospect of the election being thrown into the House, which under the Constitution must decide who is to be President if no candidate wins a clear majority in the Electoral College. The last time that happened was 1824, when four candidates split the vote and--after furious political maneuvering--the House chose John Quincy Adams though he had trailed Andrew Jackson in electoral votes.

Strategists of both parties insist that once Perot is smoked out on the issues, his support in the polls will go down and his unfavorable ratings, which are now unusually low, will go up. But they also know their own candidates have extraordinarily high unfavorable ratings that have shown no sign of coming down.

Nor do the short-lived presidential bids of such third-party challengers as Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace in 1968 and Illinois Rep. John B. Anderson in 1980 offer much consolation to the Bush and Clinton camps. While Perot still has ample opportunities to self-destruct, it is clear that both the Texan and his campaign are significantly different from most such efforts in the past.

Perot carries nothing like the baggage of Wallace’s blatant racism, for instance. And instead of drawing support from a relatively narrow segment of voters as Anderson did, polls show Perot appeals to voters across a wide spectrum.

He has vast financial resources unmatched by the two major parties and an army of volunteers at work even before he has formally announced his candidacy. New evidence of what the budding Perot organization can do came Thursday in Kentucky. To get him on the ballot, his supporters needed 5,000 signatures, and on Thursday they submitted 40,000.

Similarly, Perot’s backers in Alaska said they are filing five times the 2,000 signatures required to qualify for ballot there. Earlier, Perot said California volunteers already have collected many more signatures than the 135,000 required and are aiming for 1 million.

Perot already has been officially certified for the ballot in Utah, Tennessee, Maine and Delaware and has submitted more than enough names in Florida and his home state of Texas.

Also setting Perot apart from previous third-party challengers is the way his unconventional approach to politics meshes with popular disenchantment. His own strategists intend to do everything they can to make Perot’s campaign unmistakably different from the Bush and Clinton efforts.

For one thing, the strategists plan to develop live television call-in programs like the “electronic town halls” that Perot has pledged to hold if elected. Perot spokesman Jim Squires said they were considering having a series “or maybe just a constant stream, of Perot-and-the-People talking about the issues.”

Squires said Perot would not have “a conventional campaign with press releases, press planes, access to all the campaign strategists and all the spin doctors and the guys who are taking credit for this strategy and that strategy. This is a different world.”

Finally, underlying the Perot bid is the sheer strength of his showing in polls. No third candidate in the past has come close to his numbers. White House officials were stunned Thursday by a Los Angeles Times Poll of California voters that showed Perot out front with 39% of the votes, Clinton with 26% and the President running third with 25%. Hearing the results, White House Chief of Staff Samuel K. Skinner called a Times reporter and exclaimed, “Jesus, what do you make of that?”

Some of Bush’s advisers have told him he faces a steep, uphill battle in California in the fall because of the persistence of the deep recession in the state and adverse public reaction to his handling of the Los Angeles riots. Nevertheless, Fitzwater said the Bush campaign still plans to make an all-out effort to win the state and is not considering cutting back on campaign resources there.

If a Perot candidacy demonstrates strong staying power--and strategists for both parties believe it will--Democrats fear it could be especially devastating for Clinton and their party, particularly since the governor finished third in two national polls and in most individual states surveyed.

The outcome for Clinton could be “disastrous” if he is still mired in third place in the polls when the Democratic convention opens in New York on July 13, says former Democratic Chairman John C. White. “He needs to get a boost out of the convention and it will be hard to get any energy or enthusiasm going if he’s still in third place.”

On the other hand, Michel, the House GOP leader, expressed concern that Bush “can be in big trouble with this Perot phenomenon” and that a Perot candidacy may be attracting more Republicans than Democrats.

“All I see when I turn on the TV for a report on Perot volunteers is suburbanites, older folks and young folks and farmers--exactly the people we thought were in our Republican camp,” Michel told the breakfast session. “I’m sorry to say that the Bush campaign up to now has had problems reaching those folks.”

He warned against candidates who “offer the simple answers, the glib reply, the just-folks image, the demagogue’s gift for over-simplification,” and added that Bush needs to “lift his campaign out of the rut it has drifted into, and tell the American people what is at stake.”