COLUMN LEFT/ ELAINE CIULLA KAMARCK : Our Fling With New Faces Is Self-Delusional : Betrayed by Bush, Clinton and Congress, voters will feel worse when Perot proves to be a dud.

In all the millions of words I’ve written about politics in my lifetime, I don’t think I’ve ever used the word heartbreak. But I am beginning to think that when the history of the 1992 elections is written, heartbreak will be the dominant theme.

In the past year, George Bush and Bill Clinton have broken the hearts of even their most loyal supporters. No wonder that more and more Americans each week are picking up the pieces and moving on. But as they do, I am reminded of that old adage about second marriages--that they are the triumph of hope over experience. American voters are hoping that Ross Perot, a new Congress and a Senate with many more women will bring happiness. Odds are, more heartbreak is ahead.

It seems hard to believe, but one year ago Americans loved George Bush so much that Democrats were running away from the presidential race and political stories centered around the possibility that Bush would have “coattails” sufficient to allow Republicans to take over the House of Representatives. As America prepared to welcome back the troops from Desert Storm, it was said that Bush would use his high popularity to pass a domestic Desert Storm. It never happened.

A mere six months ago, Time put Bill Clinton on its cover and called him “the Democrats’ rising star.” He was a dream come true--a liberal who didn’t sound like an anachronism, a policy wonk with poetry, a Democrat who could talk about values and still stick it to the Republicans. And then, one week later, came Gennifer Flowers, followed by stories about Clinton’s draft status during the Vietnam War. Many people were betrayed; they stopped listening and haven’t started again.

Heartbreak has not been limited to presidential politics. The House betrayed us in a series of petty scandals, the Senate betrayed us in the Clarence Thomas hearings. Thus, come November, Congress is likely to have the largest turnover in the postwar era, the Senate may double or even triple the number of women who serve there, and on the presidential side we have a new love--Ross Perot.

Will we be happy? What will the congressional candidates who are now promising to go to Washington and get things done do when they discover that welfare costs the government very little? What will they do when they discover that the really big money in Washington is to be had not from the military budget but from means-testing Social Security, taxing workers’ health and pension benefits and getting rid of the mortgage interest deduction? Will they betray us by their inaction or by their action?

More women in the Senate will certainly improve its performance the next time someone needing Senate confirmation comes under suspicion of sexual harassment. And the new women will hopefully lead the fight to end, once and for all, the domination of the few over the many on the question of abortion. But it is not clear that gender makes one more or less able to come up with a way to get jobs into South Los Angeles, nor does gender offer any special insights into American competitiveness or development in the former communist world. The women likely to end up in the Senate this year will not betray us on women’s issues, but for those who expect them to lead a renaissance in all of government, heartbreak is inevitable.

But the most acute heartbreak will come when Perot comes face-to-face with the ghosts of the Founding Fathers, who designed a system that could not be dominated by a single executive, regardless of his strength of character. Perot told Dan Rather on Tuesday night that he would go through each department in the federal government and “restructure.” Wait until he learns that each department in the government and nearly every function performed by it is not a function of an executive decision as it is in the business world but a function of law. Restructuring requires the permission of Congress.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to see the heartbreak on the horizon. The only question now is, will our hearts be broken before or after we learn to say “President Perot”?