Battleship Perot Is Sinking at the Dock : Campaign: The captivating non-candidate of February has become the political year’sbiggest dud--and it’s only July.

While 15,000 journalists gathered in Madison Square Garden to witness an event as suspenseful as the reading of a gas meter, the hot story was that the first big leaks have sprung in the hull of the good ship Perot; the yet-undeclared candidate may sink while he is still in dry dock. The rivets that have been popping include a 10-point drop in his poll support in one week, a disastrous speech to the NAACP convention in Nashville, the fall-out with his key campaign professionals--notably Ed Rollins and ad man Hal Riney--just weeks after they came on board, and having his arm twisted by activists and recanting almost overnight his opposition to gays serving in the Cabinet and the military.

What had commended Ross Perot to many of us back in February, when he declared himself draftable, was his briskness and candor. Here, finally, was someone who really seemed to have deep convictions and, better yet, wasn’t shy about expressing them.

Back then, the novelty that Perot introduced was good novelty. He boldly, if naively, asserted that he would not back down from positions in the face of interest-group opposition. He gave yes and no answers to questions. He was going to give us the truth with the bark still on. People may have been frustrated by the lack of specifics but felt sure that when they came, the answers would cut cleanly.

It was the expectation that Perot’s deeds would be as bold as his words that caused so many people to be stirred from their civic torpor to circulate petitions, attend rallies and man telephones. Even those who looked on Perot as a mountebank conceded that he had given a real shot of ginger to the political season that just might break the cycle of alienation. His speeches were inelegant, even primitive, but they were a bracing astringent in a realm where lotions and salves are the usual prescription.

But then we began to see the bad novelty. His metaphors got stale. His views, which had seemed keen and analytical when we first heard them, were revealed, upon repetition, to be no more than a collection of homilies. But it was not until the NAACP convention that Perot achieved the transcendent irony for an outsider candidate: He gave a speech that caused us to think better of professional politicians.

No politician of any standing--certainly no Democrat--would have presented a black audience with such a pageant of mawkish condescension as Perot gave the NAACP delegates. It was an effort to give an “I am not a racist” speech but it sounded more like a “some of my best friends” speech. It was there, in Nashville, that the novelty was unmasked as the maladroitness of the inexperienced.

Even before that debacle, we could see the unmasking of a man who had vowed to stand resolutely in defense of his principles against the importunings of special-interest groups. On May 29, on the ABC program “20/20,” Perot declared that he would not nominate a homosexual for his Cabinet. He had, at other times, supported the exclusion of gays from the military. Perot’s reasoning on Cabinet appointments was rather tortured, coming down to his assertion that a homosexual orientation would be a distraction in the confirmation process. After the broadcast, Perot was besieged by representatives of gay groups and he caved in. On the matter of gays in the Cabinet, Perot seemed to undergo an instant conversion to equal employment. His capitulation on gays in the military, however, was craven. He retreated into the most cowardly bureaucratic language by saying that the ultimate decision would be up to his secretary of defense. So much for the man who has been invoking Harry Truman on where the buck stops.

Perot has also added nuance and obfuscation to his earlier forthright positions on gun control and abortion. The suspicion is that the interest groups got to him on those matters as well.

Ross Perot is guilty of the failings that he has ascribed to the professional politicians. He doesn’t stick to his guns. He has not taken the heat and risked the disillusionment of his supporters. The brave promises of conventional politicians tend to be dismissed by voters. People actually believe that Ross Perot is different. In demonstrating that he is no different, he now suffers in comparison to those who he had so contemptuously dismissed. He is out of his depth, out of steam, and will soon be out of the running.