Perot’s Broad Appeal Sewn Together by Vague Threads

WASHINGTON — The phenomenal support for Texas billionaire Ross Perot’s independent presidential candidacy crosses all the lines of conventional politics: ideology, party, age, income and geography. But that may also represent Perot’s greatest challenge: Can he hold his newfound coalition together in the face of demands that he start taking more specific positions?

Perot and his strategists believe they can. The key, in their minds, is avoiding the pitfall of appearing to be a traditional politician making a series of appeals designed to please various constituent groups. At the same time, he needs to resist the pressure to stake out positions that could fracture his emerging movement, which is held together mostly by a common dissatisfaction with the political status quo.

Stressing “principles” rather than “positions,” as Perot himself says, could put the maverick candidate at odds with the press, most of the political Establishment, and voters who yearn for solutions that address their specific problems.

Nevertheless, Perot aides reason that minimizing specifics--or at least avoiding framing issues along traditional lines--is a political necessity, and even a strength, for Perot.

The dangers of getting too specific were apparent a week ago in Perot’s televised interview with Barbara Walters. In answer to a question, he said he would not appoint acknowledged homosexuals to top Cabinet posts, a position that ended up dominating news coverage of the broadcast and alienating gay rights groups. Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton immediately attacked him, and the next day Perot was forced to revise and explain his remarks, something he has rarely had to do.

Unlike President Bush and Clinton, Perot has not had to clamber through the thicket of primary elections that force candidates to appeal to various interest groups for help in winning their party’s nomination. Instead, his unprecedented come-from-nowhere bid for the White House has emerged virtually unencumbered with promises and pledges.

In place of those ties, Perot has made a covenant with voters to be different, to toss aside politics as usual.

In his campaign, “you don’t decide that in order to win California we’ve got to get the Hispanic vote in South Los Angeles and send him out there to eat a burrito,” Perot aide James Squires said. “That won’t work,” because it would make Perot seem too much like a traditional politician and undercut his support. “And anyway, he wouldn’t do it,” Squires said.

It is unclear whether the strategy will work. In the heat of battle with Clinton and Bush, Perot will be pressed to spell out specific proposals that inevitably will test his ability to hold his coalition together. But for the moment, at least, the broad spectrum of backing for Perot is the envy of the political world.

“His support comes from everywhere, up end and low end, Catholic and Protestant, North and South,” says Fred Steeper, pollster for Bush. “It’s not tied to anything except dissatisfaction, and given that everybody is dissatisfied, he’s just picking off a little bit of everything.”

And everywhere he goes, Perot exploits that dissatisfaction to the fullest. “There is a system existing in Washington and our country today driven by massive amounts of money needed to buy television, et cetera, et cetera,” Perot said at a rally last Sunday in Clinton’s hometown of Little Rock, Ark. “That leaves all of us out down here at the grass-roots level. Now we’ve got to change that, and here’s your secret weapon--it’s your vote.”

Public opinion surveys testify to the breadth of that message’s appeal. In national surveys taken over the last three weeks, Perot attracted roughly 30% of Americans regardless of income or political ideology. He also appealed equally, from 25% to 30%, across age groups and across all regions of the country, although he is weaker in the Northeast.

If Perot has a weakness, it is among blacks, from whom he gets only 15% to 20% backing, and among women, where he has been getting about 25% compared to 30% among men. But his support among women has been climbing.

If Perot has a core, it is among voters in the ideological center, those Americans who identify themselves as liberal Republicans or moderate Democrats and among independents.

Now that Perot is a force, his advisers acknowledge that holding this coalition together while adding new elements of the electorate to it demands a delicate balance. That is one reason why on Wednesday the Perot campaign chose to hire well-known professional political managers from both the Republican and the Democratic parties.

“This guy Ross Perot is attracting support across the board and I wanted to make sure that we preserved that,” top Perot political adviser Tom Luce said in an interview on his hiring of former Ronald Reagan aide Edward J. Rollins and former Jimmy Carter aide Hamilton Jordan. “We are running an independent campaign.”

To help sustain their position, Perot’s advisers know that being too specific or too traditional in approaching issues involves risks. But they argue this won’t be a problem because they contend that voters are more concerned with character and leadership than who has the most detailed proposals.

“There are a lot of 17-point programs out there already,” Luce says. “We are not going to come up with a silver bullet or a brand new idea” on that issue.

“What Ross has demonstrated is a skill at building consensus, being a leader who brings people together and provides the leadership to bite some bullets. The problem in this country is not its choices but its ability to make some choices. And I think that’s what people want to learn about Ross--how he would (make choices) and what kind of a leader he is.”

Won’t Perot, once the early fascination has worn off, have to show Americans what direction he will go?

Yes, says Perot adviser Squires, but not in the way that many in the press and Establishment politics believe. “Everyone in the press wants these little box charts. Well people don’t care whether he is for or against the Brady Bill” to impose a waiting period on handguns. The press frames issues that way, “but regular people want to know if he is going to approach the whole issue of gun control with common sense.”

That is particularly true because part of Perot’s appeal is his unorthodox image. When Perot, for instance, was pressed on the NBC program “Meet the Press” last month about whether he was for or against the Brady Bill, how he felt about the Jobs Corps, and whether his math on the deficit added up, some analysts thought his performance would force him to begin being more specific and perhaps shy away from the press.

But such was not the case. Perot’s refusal to be pigeonholed into defining issues in traditional ways is precisely what people like about him, his advisers say, and as evidence they point to his continuing surge in the polls.

Referring to the Perot grass-roots backers whose calls flood phone banks at his Dallas headquarters, Squires says: “We talk to those people all the time in hundreds of phone calls every day. I get 40 messages a day off the phone banks giving me feedback on what people calling in are saying. One of the things I’ve learned is that when there is something that would ordinarily dry up support, it doesn’t bother them.”

Although they caution that no final plan is in place, Perot advisers say people should not look for him to stage events with specific interest groups and constituencies. A more likely vision of what to expect was provided at a rally last month in Orlando featuring a diverse assemblage of supporters who carried posters for causes ranging from protecting abortion rights to the return of those listed as missing in action in Vietnam. Blacks and Latinos sat side by side on the dais with retirees and housewives. The man who led the pledge of allegiance had a ponytail.

Many rallies will take place without the press knowing about them, advisers also say, so that voters can meet Perot without the media acting as a filter.

And there will be endless television exposure. Perot prefers television appearances that are long--at least 30 minutes--and that are unedited.

But despite allegations that he has relied excessively on the sort of television appearances that he can control--one reporter has taken to calling him the “hologram candidate”--aides say most of his media time is still spent talking one on one with newspaper reporters for lengthy interviews.

Opposing strategists believe that Perot will get his comeuppance for what they consider his calculated ambiguity. “The polls show that an even number of liberals and conservatives are for him, and that can’t last,” says Charles Black, senior adviser to the Bush campaign. “People are not going to go into a polling booth and vote for somebody they know that little about.”

Perot is particularly vulnerable in this regard, Bush pollster Steeper contended, because he has no established party base to fall back on. “It’s all himself. So if he develops personal flaws, his support can just go away.”

So far time has not borne out their predictions, and now even House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) says: “Perot may literally turn out to be like Reagan in that the news media can expose him and attack him and people will say, ‘None of that counts because he is the symbol of my frustration, and whatever you say about my symbol is just a comment on your role in Washington.’ ”

Some Democratic strategists agree. “Politicians have a propensity to make a huge list of things they are going to try to do,” notes Michael Ford, adviser to former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., whose bid for the Democratic presidential nomination was grounded in some similar discontent.

“But No. 1, everybody thinks it’s all bull,” Ford says. “And No. 2, making lists takes you down to points of disagreement rather than taking you up to points of general agreement, which is what Perot has been doing and should continue to do.”

This does not mean he must avoid talking about details. “He (Perot) has got to be sure that people hear him taking his own approach,” says Republican strategist John Sears, among the number of seasoned political hands to whom Perot has turned for advice. Thus, if Perot wants to contend that the way to lick the deficit is to slash the huge overhead expenses and inefficient bureaucracy of federal programs, Sears says that he needs to mention defense spending as well as welfare.

The point, Sears said: “Make sure you hold everybody guilty.”