Perot Plays Down Campaign Squabbles : Rally: Texan tells Michigan backers problems with volunteers and staffers are minor. But aides set up meetings to iron out differences.

Undeclared presidential candidate Ross Perot attended a rally of supporters here Friday against a backdrop of growing intramural squabbling among Perot volunteers and paid political staffers.

While Perot continued to insist that the campaign’s internal problems were “insignificant,” senior aides have scheduled two, two-day “training sessions” in Dallas later this month for volunteers from around the country.

Perot press secretary Sharon Holman said the Dallas meetings would be an opportunity for the central campaign staff to share its expertise with key volunteer leaders. She said the idea grew from a luncheon meeting earlier this week in Dallas that Perot held with volunteer coordinators from 48 states.

Perot, speaking to several thousand supporters on the steps of the state Capitol, said he saw ominous parallels between the nation and General Motors Corp., where he was once on the board of directors.

“Our country right now, in plain simple terms, is where General Motors was in the mid-1980s,” the Texas billionaire said.

At that time, Perot was engaged in a bitter power struggle with then-GM Chairman Roger Smith, criticizing GM’s management for investing in non-automotive projects rather than in building better cars.

GM finally silenced him by buying out his interest in a GM subsidiary for $770 million, after which he left the parent company’s board.

Perot said the nation has to reassert its role as a world economic leader.

“We are going to jack up that car. We are going to get under that hood and we are going to go night and day to make it perfect before it completely breaks down in the middle of Death Valley somewhere,” he told the rally.

Michigan volunteers on Friday turned in more than 300,000 petition signatures to gain Perot a spot on the November presidential ballot. The state requires only 27,000 valid signatures for ballot certification.

The Perot organization has now won a place on the ballot in 22 states and submitted sufficient numbers of signatures in nine other states.

A Michigan Perot volunteer who has been invited to one of the Dallas training sessions said the meetings had been requested by volunteers to iron out worsening turf battles and to bring some central direction to the diffuse Perot movement.

Perot, at a brief airport press conference in Lansing before leaving for Nashville, where he will address the NAACP today, said he was unaware of the training sessions later this month.

He acknowledged that there may be occasional “friction” within the large volunteer organization, but he said that it was to be expected and represented only “a tiny little problem.” He said that the same was almost certainly true of Democratic and Republican organizations at the local level.

The Michigan Perot organization appears to reflect the growing internal strains nationwide.

Ron Scott, a senior leader of the volunteer movement, said that the leaders of a number of Perot state organizations asked for a meeting in Dallas to resolve numerous local problems.

His chief concern--and one expressed by a number of early Perot volunteers--was that the dedicated Perot workers who helped get the Texan on the ballot would be shoved aside by paid political pros named by Perot headquarters in Dallas.

“We wanted to make sure that our activity and participation was ensured” as the movement shifts from gathering petition signatures to running a full-fledged political campaign, Scott said.

“There are 15,000 volunteers in the state,” said Scott, who has been active in Michigan Democratic politics for nearly 20 years. “They want to have the opportunity to give input and give direction to the campaign.”

Scott expressed resentment toward Richard Jewell, who described himself as the Michigan Perot campaign director. Scott said Jewell gave himself that title and as far as he was concerned was not directing anything.

Jewell, who took a leave of absence from his job as a criminal investigator for the state of Michigan to work for Perot, said that the petition drive phase of the Perot movement was complete and that it was now time for a smaller number of professionals to manage the effort.

“The administration of it, the really tough job, has to go to a small group. Bringing expert political advisers into the states will help the states,” said Jewell, who has no previous political experience.

Jewell said he was on the Perot payroll, but had taken a pay cut to work on the campaign. He said he reports to Ralph Perkins, the Dallas-based Midwest regional coordinator for the Perot campaign.