PERSPECTIVE ON ROSS PEROT : A Bean Up the Body Politic’s Nose : Early enthusiasm will wither when voters discover his contempt for what sustains our democratic republic.

One way to increase the odds that a 3-year-old will put a bean up his nose is to predict within earshot that he will do so. This produces what social scientists call a self-fulfilling prophecy, in which totally improbable social phenomena are brought into being by entertaining them seriously.

Ross Perot is currently the bean up the nose of the body politic. Evidently mesmerized by Perot’s threat, or promise, to spend a ton of his own money to buy his way into consideration for the presidency in a year when everyone is allegedly angry, the news media are disregarding the lessons of history to give him a puff.

Bizarre scenarios reaching for the most obscure clauses of the 12th Amendment yield hypothetical presidencies for Senate President Pro-tem Robert Byrd, House Speaker Tom Foley and a clutch of possible Clinton running mates who might act as President in case the House is deadlocked on the presidential choice. These fantasies are based on assumptions that Perot’s popularity will hold up or increase, neutralizing the Electoral College and throwing the presidential choice into the House of Representatives, where any one of six things might happen, or fail to happen.

To a manufacturer of conventional wisdom like myself, much of this seems silly. It is overwhelmingly probable that the next President will be the nominee of the Republican or the Democratic party. Most voters loyally cast ballots for their party nominee.

Perot, never having held public office, is completely unqualified to serve as President. His negative attitude toward public accountability is hard to reconcile with the plain sense of the Constitution. His contempt for the politicians, political institutions and political processes of this enormously successful democratic republic harmonize badly with the highly political duties that presidents must perform.

Aside from the recent history of well-publicized third-party candidacies--George Wallace and John Anderson, neither of whom was a strong enough vote-getter to derail the Electoral College and both of whom were serious politicians--there are good reasons to think the Perot candidacy won’t pan out.

Perot is like a newly proposed initiative. Californians are used to the phenomenon of the well-financed initiative that at first sight seems reasonable enough. After a while and little scrutiny, many such initiatives don’t look so good. Their popularity begins to fade. In the end, the higher the voter turnout, the more likely an initiative will go down to defeat.

Although Perot has done the signal service of distracting journalists from the likes of Jerry Brown and Pat Buchanan, there is also serious journalistic business to be done, namely the examination of what he thinks, what he has done and why anybody should take seriously a presidential candidate with no public record. The sooner this business is begun, the less we shall need to worry that the press has created a self-fulfilling media monster out of its own boredom during the boring part of an election year.