COLUMN LEFT/ ELAINE CIULLA KAMARCK : We’re Down to a Stark and Easy Choice : Perot’s departure returns politics to some normalcy. Clinton should benefit.

When Ross Perot decided not to run for President, everything about the presidential race seemed to change; but in fact nothing changed at all.

During the past five months of Perot mania, Perot himself never became anything more than a convenient vehicle through which people could register their intense unhappiness with the Democratic and Republican parties. Like Pat Buchanan and Paul Tsongas before him, he prospered in the polls when he was merely an idea, a tabula rasa on which a frustrated electorate could paint their ideal leader, and he failed when viewed in all his imperfect humanity.

We are left with reality: two politicians, George Bush and Bill Clinton, who are no more and no less perfect than you and me, and two political parties, each of which has its hard core of support but neither of which commands, by itself, a majority.

Perot’s decision is supposed to be good news for Bush, who lost no time in beckoning Perot’s supporters into his camp. In the next few days, you will hear Republicans give some variation on this theme: The more this election looks like past elections--in other words, when it is just a race between Democrats and Republicans--the more likely it is that Bush will prevail. There is a certain amount of truth to this. Without Perot in the race, Bush can probably count on winning a base of traditional, hard-core Republican states in the Rocky Mountains and the South.

But Clinton’s decision to put Al Gore on the ticket turns out to be very smart. Democrats don’t need a solid South to win the White House, but they lose if they can’t pick off some Southern states.

California, which has eluded the Democrats for so long, is reeling under the combination of riots, earthquakes, recessions and state bankruptcy. It is therefore ripe for the message of change--as is any state in exceptional turmoil. Clinton was going nowhere there while Perot sucked up the anger vote, but he now has a chance to win California and the other states, especially in the Northeast, that have been hard hit by recession.

But with this crashing return to electoral normalcy, the pathologies of the two parties stand out even more clearly than before. Whichever can change itself and convey that change to the electorate will, in the end, prevail.

George Bush and his close friend James Baker are fishing in Wyoming today, and they may catch a theme or an idea to stop Bush’s long slide. The Democrats began their process of change last night. For 12 years, they have practiced what my colleague Bill Galston and I once called the politics of evasion--a series of excuses for Democratic presidential defeats that allowed them to evade the hard chore of ideological self-examination. Bill Clinton halted the politics of evasion with these words addressed to the convention: “We Democrats have some changing to do, too.”

In a speech that showed no absence of “the vision thing,” Clinton put the Democratic party back into the moral, economic and governmental mainstream of America. For the moral message, he returned to a theme first outlined in October, 1991--the New Covenant. This, he told the convention, was “a solemn commitment between the people and their government, based not simply on what each of us can take but on what all of us must give to make America work again.” He took back the issue of family values, which Democrats had so foolishly ceded to the Republicans for so long, and challenged the less-than-perfect parenting of his own baby-boom generation: “Take responsibility for your children or we will force you to do it. Because governments don’t raise children; parents do.” He placed himself firmly in step with the free-market revolution that has swept the world with his promise of “an expanding, entrepreneurial economy of high-skill, high-wage jobs.” And he cut to the core of the voters’ suspicion about his party’s addiction to big government: “It’s time for us to realize that there is not a government program for every problem. . . . Big bureaucracies, public and private, have failed.”

But this speech is only the beginning of a very hard campaign. The themes in it, good as they are, must be repeated over and over again, and the campaign has to look for ways to make the themes come alive. Almost nothing in the speech had not been said already by Clinton himself in the very successful opening months of his campaign. But in the weeks and months that followed, he showed a distressing tendency to lose the message in the exigencies of the day-to-day campaign. He no longer has the luxury of losing his focus. If he is to beat George Bush and become a convincing agent of change, every day, every event and every word from now until November matters.