Perot Saw His Chances Falling, Clinton’s Rising

Ross Perot decided to end his extraordinary quest for the White House after he saw his own campaign apparatus begin to unravel and top political aides told him that, with Democratic nominee Bill Clinton’s political fortunes improving, his once-rising chances of victory were now slim to none.

The Texas independent had agonized for several days over internal problems and missteps on the stump that threatened to sink his campaign, sources said. But he considered remaining in the race up until late Wednesday night, when he made his decision after conferring with Thomas W. Luce III and Morton Meyerson, his longtime aides and confidants.

Earlier Wednesday, Edward J. Rollins, a leading Republican strategist, had left the campaign in frustration. And Hamilton Jordan, a top Democratic consultant, had told Perot he shared Rollins’ view that the unconventional campaign Perot insisted on conducting was a loser.

Rollins, interviewed Thursday upon his return from Dallas to Washington, said Perot saw “the potential of winning diminishing day by day, and I think he just didn’t want to run the kind of campaign he would have had to run to win.”

Clinton’s choice of Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee as his running mate and the overwhelmingly positive public response the selection elicited from voters was a major factor in Perot’s decision not to run, said one campaign adviser. The Democratic ticket had surged ahead of President Bush and Perot in opinion surveys conducted during the Democratic Convention.

“Here you had a guy (Clinton) who had 55% negative ratings, and all of a sudden he has 50% favorable ratings,” the Perot adviser said. “Clinton picked the best possible running mate to appeal to many of the people who support Perot. Ross Perot said he believed if he stayed in the race under the circumstances, it would have gone to the House and I think he believed that.”

In a three-way race, if none of the three candidates polls a majority of the electoral votes, the election would be thrown into the House of Representatives, where an independent candidate would have a difficult time winning. In announcing his decision not to run, Perot emphasized that point, saying such an outcome would be unacceptably disruptive to the country.

Problems in Campaign

Over the last two weeks, the insurgent Perot campaign had been plagued by problems in the Dallas headquarters and in some of the offices around the country that were staffed by volunteers.

In Dallas, where a campaign staff of about 150 persons has operated, Rollins and about 10 political operatives he had brought with him to the campaign were increasingly at loggerheads with other campaign officials--especially those who had been with Perot from the beginning of the quest.

Several of Rollins’ aides joined him in resigning from the campaign Wednesday. When a reporter asked another top Perot campaign official how many of them were leaving, the official said, “Not enough.”

Aggravating the differences over strategy, some Perot officials blamed Rollins for leaking recent reports to the news media that the campaign was in disarray and that Jordan was considering resigning.

The news accounts infuriated Perot, who already was upset over reports that campaign volunteers resented the bid by new campaign staffers to take over the efforts to gather voters’ signatures on the petitions required to win him ballot positions in all 50 states.

“We’ve had a number of problems with petitions,” said one campaign source. “Some people have used false names. Some said they were qualified when they weren’t. Some were felons. We had all kinds of problems.

“That’s the reason we asked the (electors) to commit themselves to vote for Perot (in the Electoral College). It wasn’t a matter of loyalty oaths, but for all we knew they could be for George Bush.”

The campaign had so many faulty signatures on petitions in Illinois and Missouri that they had to be recirculated. When a campaign staffer tried to take over one state’s petition drive, said a senior Perot adviser, “the volunteer chairman said that if he couldn’t be in charge, he would burn the petitions.”

“We found the grass roots could really be unruly,” the adviser said.

Perot--who has been exceptionally uncomfortable with the idea of such traditional campaign trappings as motorcades, frequent press conferences and image-building advertising--ignored much of the advice offered by professionals on his staff. He insisted on doing things his way, which led to gaffes in the last two weeks that depressed the spirits of aides and aggravated Perot’s own frustration.

“He certainly didn’t like all the press stories. He didn’t like the scrutiny,” said Rollins. “He felt there was a great unfairness to it all, that he had a different story he really wanted to talk about--about where the country should be going, and everything seemed to be a distraction, including what was going on in his own campaign.”

Perot surprised most of his own staff when he announced his decision not to run. James Squires, the former Chicago Tribune editor who served as the campaign communications director, did not learn of the decision until he was notified in a telephone call to his Dallas apartment at midnight Wednesday. Less than three hours earlier, he had been talking with a Times reporter about arranging an interview with Perot.

Options Discussed

But for several days Perot had been talking over his options with his inner circle--including not running. He discussed the options with Jordan on Wednesday. Jordan said he went to bed “thinking he wouldn’t run, but I wasn’t 100% sure.”

He himself did not learn of the decision until a regular 8 a.m. meeting with Luce and Meyerson.

Jordan described Perot as “laughing and joking and in a good mood” at a meeting before announcing his decision.

“Today he was relieved and happy because he believed he had done the right thing,” Jordan said.

Of all Perot’s gaffes, his aides cited his ill-fated speaking appearance before the NAACP convention in Nashville last Saturday as the one that hurt him the most and caused him to reconsider whether he wanted to run for President.

In his Nashville speech, he several times referred to the delegates as “you people” and to blacks as “your people,” and made other remarks delegates found offensive, insensitive and condescending.

The crestfallen Perot called Jordan and several other advisers to discuss his frustration. “He anguished at the thought that he had said something that would hurt or offend people,” Jordan said Thursday. “He was anguished about that--not his performance, but that he’d said something that would offend another human being.”

Shortly thereafter, according to Jordan, Perot began to discuss the possibility that he might not want to run after all. For the next several days he apparently mulled over his options, aides said.

But not until about 9 p.m. Wednesday did Perot summon his longtime confidants to his walled estate in North Dallas for a serious discussion of whether he should end a candidacy that had never been officially announced.

There followed an hourlong meeting, during which Perot and Meyerson--perhaps his closest confidant--debated the options back and forth.

“I told him, basically, there were two choices--go all out and win, press it to the wall--or stop, because any intermediate plan was foolish,” Meyerson said.

“One of Perot’s chief concerns,” he said, “was how his volunteers would react. He suspected--accurately, as it turned out--that many would not only be shocked, but feel betrayed and abandoned.”

Meyerson quoted Perot as saying he would “hate to hurt” the volunteers, but felt he had to decide on the basis of the larger question--which he said was that it would hurt the country if he ran and the race were thrown into the House of Representatives.

The Perot campaign actually began to unravel last week, although one top campaign official said it had been “paralyzed” almost since Rollins joined the staff 45 days ago and internal tension and other problems began to develop.

Statement on Gays

Perot, still reeling from a barrage of White House-directed attacks on his character and a spate of negative news stories, last week was maneuvered by gay interest groups into issuing a statement pledging not to tolerate discrimination against homosexuals anywhere in the government.

His attitude toward gays had been in question since he said in a late May television interview that he would not appoint gays to Cabinet positions and that the presence of gays in the military was not “realistic.”

But Perot’s new statement, though carefully worded, failed to satisfy many of the gay activists with whom he and his senior aides had met over the previous month. They continued to demand that he promise to end the military ban on gays. He refused, saying it was a matter for the courts and the secretary of defense to adjudicate. That left the outspoken gay community vocally unhappy.

On Thursday of last week, Perot appeared on the NBC “Today” program and seemed uncomfortable from the outset. Looking tired and sounding testy, he engaged in verbal jousting with host Katie Couric. He was curt at times and waved off questions on several critical newspaper articles, referring to them as “Fruit Loop” stories written “without regard to facts.”

He denied that his campaign was conducting polls when in fact it has been polling voters for several weeks. He dismissed serious questions about his potential running mate and a well-documented news story about his use of a private investigator in a business dispute as meaningless “gossip.”

Luce, Perot’s campaign manager, called a press conference last Friday to work out logistic arrangements with the growing media corps covering the Perot campaign. But the session turned into a full-blown media event with several campaign officials defending Perot’s positions on homosexuals, denying growing problems in the volunteer organization, and explaining why there were so few women and minorities in positions of influence in the campaign.

Luce also announced the second change in a week in the Perot press operation: Liz Maas, who has experience in several Republican campaigns, would join the operation to filter all press phone calls, while Sharon Holman, a longtime Perot aide, would assume the formal title of press secretary.

Squires, who had been the press secretary, would be elevated to be in charge of communications and “message.”

Perot traveled to Lansing, Mich., where he spoke to a rally of supporters who had just submitted petitions to put his name on the Michigan general election ballot. As he was leaving Lansing--and against his better instincts--Perot agreed to a “press availability” at the airport. He was snappish from the start, refusing to clarify his stand on gay rights, denying obvious problems in the volunteer corps and trying to stare down a reporter who asked when he might offer some specific plans for solving the country’s problems.

Then came the NAACP convention in Nashville where Perot had an opportunity to make inroads among black voters, who had greeted his independent candidacy with skepticism.

Perot aides advised him to deliver a message of economic renewal and express his oft-stated belief that the difficult circumstances of minorities in America could only be bettered by an expanding economy and growing job opportunities in urban centers.

But Perot veered off into autobiography, telling the crowd that his father, a cotton trader, treated his black employees generously because “they are people too.” He also referred on several occasions to the economic, drug and crime problems of “you people” and “your people”--even after a heckler tried to correct him to say “our people.”

Scores of convention delegates complained that Perot’s comments had been offensive or patronizing. Whatever support he might have garnered by his appearance at the convention--the first of his campaign before a black audience--appeared to have been squandered.

Staff writers Edwin Chen, John Broder and Robert Stewart contributed to this story.