Candidates Jockey to Define Selves--and Each Other : Politics: Clinton and Perot seek stable, clear positive images. Bush wants to portray his rivals in indelibly bad terms.

For George Bush, Bill Clinton and Ross Perot, the name of the political game this month--and probably for the rest of the summer as well--is “definition.”

All three presidential candidates have embarked on a race against time and limited public interest, the object of which is to control the public perception of oneself and one’s rivals. Both Clinton and Perot still need to establish stable, clear and positive public images. Bush, whose image is already well established--for better or worse--needs to find a way to create images of his opponents so indelible that it leaves them permanently crippled.

Bush built his victory in 1988 over Michael S. Dukakis on such a strategy. Willie Horton--the black convict who raped a white woman after being let out of a Massachusetts prison on furlough--stands as the classic example of how a campaign can create an image for its opponent. This time around, with a volatile three-way race, the issue of who gets to define whom has taken on even greater importance.

A poll by the Times Mirror Center for the People and the Press, released Monday, indicates one of the reasons. Perot received 36% of the vote in the poll, compared to Bush and Clinton at 31% and 27%--a statistical tie given the poll’s margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.

But when pollsters substituted the name of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf for Perot’s name in the poll, Schwarzkopf did almost as well--29%, a strong indication that although Perot has an extremely favorable public image for now, much of his support has little to do with himself and more with a hunger on the part of voters for a strong leader who is “someone else.”

The Times Mirror poll, which surveyed 3,517 adults from May 28 through June 10, also found that Bush’s approval rating has taken another tumble. Only 32% of those surveyed approved of Bush’s job performance, down from 37% last month and 77% a year ago. Times Mirror Co. is the owner of the Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, broadcasting and publishing enterprises.

For all three candidates--but particularly for Clinton and Perot--the next few weeks are crucial to the effort to define themselves. Despite the intense competition of the primary season, the majority of American voters ignore primaries and have only vague and loosely held views of the candidates who compete in them. During the summer, particularly around the time of the party conventions, a whole new audience begins to pay attention. Yet a third group of potential voters starts tuning in to the elections in the fall.

In 1988, Dukakis never realized the degree to which he remained unknown to most potential voters, said Mark Gearan, who served as Dukakis’ press secretary at the time and who now advises Clinton’s campaign. “He thought because he had been out there campaigning all these months, people knew who he was,” Gearan said.

The need to define himself in voters’ eyes lay behind Clinton’s weekend fight with Jesse Jackson. If voters will take a “second look” at Clinton, the Democratic camp wants them to see a candidate willing to stand up to traditional Democratic interest groups. In that light, a fight with Jackson could help, particularly given the substance of the quarrel--Clinton’s criticism of a rap singer who was perceived to have advocated racial killings. Few voters of any color are likely to disagree with him when he says he opposes racial killings.

Some Democrats, Jackson in particular, have argued that in a three-way race Clinton should follow exactly the opposite path--aim at rousing the Democratic Party’s traditional base and thereby win 35% to 40% of the vote. If Perot and Bush split the remaining vote, Jackson argues, the Democrat would win.

Clinton and his aides have rejected that position, however, arguing that in the end the campaign will become a two-person contest.

For Perot, the situation looks somewhat different. He has created an overwhelmingly positive image for himself--the man of action, a strong leader and an outsider.

But that image rests on a very small base of knowledge. One recent poll showed that 79% of people surveyed said they knew Perot very little or not at all. Before Perot can fill in the gaps in what voters know about him, the Bush team hopes to create a very different public image--that of a man whose actions are often rash, whose strength blends into intolerance and destructiveness, a politician who is so far outside the mainstream that he would be ineffective, maybe even dangerous.

Friday, Vice President Dan Quayle attacked Perot as a “temperamental tycoon who has contempt for the Constitution,” quoting a Perot remark from last fall to suggest that the Texas billionaire would try to rewrite the nation’s fundamental document.

Sunday, Bush adviser Charles Black and Republican Party Chairman Richard N. Bond followed up the same line in a joint appearance on CBS-TV’s “Face the Nation” program.

Polls taken by Republican strategists show that potential voters already have concerns about Perot, many of which involve the worry that he might not prove able to work well with others. The Republicans hope to amplify those concerns as they try to persuade voters that Perot poses an unacceptable risk for the country.

A second prong of the Republican attack has been to highlight positions that Perot has taken that might anger voters who would otherwise support Bush as well as positions on which Perot has changed his mind. The idea is to suggest on the one hand that Perot is more liberal than voters think and, on the other, that Perot is just another politician who says what is convenient, rather than a man who says what he believes.

Republican strategists hope, for example, that Perot’s support for abortion rights will cause conservative, anti-abortion voters to return to Bush’s camp.

Perot, for his part, has plunged into the definition game, himself, seeking to change the public view of Bush. In his most recent public appearance--his two-hour call-in program on NBC-TV’s “Today” show last week, Perot lambasted Bush for coddling Saddam Hussein before the Gulf War. He also reminded his viewers that Bush as Ronald Reagan’s vice president had presided over the deregulation of banks and savings and loans during the 1980s.