Aides to Bush Would Welcome Perot Candidacy

As White House aides held out hope that the return of Ross Perot might put their own campaign on a better track, President Bush wound up a two-day rail trip Sunday with a new appeal to supporters of the Texas billionaire.

After a buoyant 233-mile Middle American journey that also brought reminders of what still ails his reelection bid, Bush and his campaign turned their attention to a meeting today in Dallas, where Perot is weighing a re-entry into the presidential race.

Bush used a final rally here to tout his own approach to the deficit-reduction plans advocated by Perot. But campaign strategists frustrated by an inability to ignite a Bush comeback said they would welcome the turbulence created if Perot were to rejoin the fray.

“ Anything to shake things up,” one senior campaign official said, acknowledging that the stasis of the current two-man race left the Bush team “pretty much dead in the water” just 37 days before the election.

Perot is expected to make up his mind this week whether to return to the fray, and both Bush and Democratic nominee Bill Clinton will dispatch high-level delegations to Dallas today to deliver back-to-back, closed-door presentations designed to shape the on-again, off-again candidate’s next decision.

In a public preview of that message, Bush charged here Sunday that Clinton had “no serious plan to control the deficit” and touted his own agenda as the only one that would scale back the size of government, curb the growth of government spending, and reduce the federal deficit.

“That is the only way to give the kids here today a better America tomorrow,” he told a huge, flag-waving crowd whose enthusiasm for Bush was exceeded only by their shrieks as the afternoon sky erupted in a post-rally fireworks display.

Perot abandoned his independent candidacy for the White House in July, saying he had concluded that he could not win and that the Democratic Party had revitalized itself. But he reserved the right to re-enter if neither remaining candidate addressed the deficit to his satisfaction. He convened today’s meeting with his 50 state coordinators after saying last week that he had been mistaken in withdrawing from the race.

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Bush’s delegation to meet with the Perot supporters will be headed by campaign chairman Robert M. Teeter and will include National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft, Sen. Phil Gramm of Texas and Housing Secretary Jack Kemp. The Clinton team will be headed by campaign chairman Mickey Kantor and will include retired Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., Sen. David L. Boren and civil rights leader Vernon E. Jordan Jr.

The Clinton camp, content with a status quo that has given the Arkansas governor a minimum lead of 10 percentage points in most recent polls, has privately made clear that it would prefer that Perot stay out of the race. But in a series of conversations this weekend, Bush strategists said they believe the President can benefit if Perot returns.

Some Republican officials claimed that their own calculations show Bush would benefit. But the fingers-crossed spirit of the traveling White House seemed mostly to reflect a conclusion that Bush’s stalled campaign desperately needs an external boost.

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Bush himself is scheduled to attend two fund-raisers in Dallas today, but he told reporters Sunday that he would not meet with Perot. But White House officials made clear they regard the Perot-sponsored meeting as a critical event in the campaign.

Publicly, the Bush aides stressed that their intent will be to persuade Perot and his team of the merit of the President’s economic proposals. But in confessing their private hopes that Perot would renew his suspended campaign, they also described a more subtle strategy designed to take advantage of the latest twist in a sometimes-bizarre election year.

Perot has shown no eagerness to do any favors for the President in the past, and Bush aides said a priority of today’s meeting would be to blunt the possibility that the Texas billionaire would devote his renewed campaign to attacks on the White House. In the weeks before Perot withdrew, he and Bush traded charges while leaving Clinton unscathed.

Bush spent a second straight day perched on the rear platform of his slow-moving campaign train, shouting and waving to thousands of cheering Michiganders who flocked to rail crossings to greet him.

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Many of the supporters carried American flags, and, as the train rolled past, their faces were frozen in expressions of awe and admiration that left Bush beaming with delight. After he kicked off the weekend with a vow to help make every day the Fourth of July, his supporters did that twice, first with a Saturday night fireworks display and again with the afternoon incendiaries here.

But the Bush train rushed through blue-collar towns like Toledo, Ohio, and stopped short of impoverished Flint, Mich., where unemployed workers could be counted on to give the President an unwelcomed response.

Even in such Republican strongholds as Plymouth, Mich., he met with signs urging him to “Get Off Your Caboose and Debate”--a reference to the President’s refusal to agree to a bipartisan commission’s plan for four debates. Two scheduled debates have already been canceled because of Bush’s objection to the format.

Others who flocked to freight-line rights-of-way in the two states included vocal and demonstrative dissenters. Amid Ohio farmland, men twice turned their backs and lowered their pants to the President as he passed.

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Bush clearly took delight in the unorthodox trip and told aides he hoped to stage another before the election. But his insistence of confidence sometimes took on a self-deprecating air, as when he insisted in Bowling Green, Ohio, that he had looked out the window and “saw a bunch of cows doing the wave; things are looking up.”

The President also spattered his speeches with bitter outbursts against a Democratic rival he sometimes seems stunned to be trailing in the polls. In Plymouth, where supporters held torches aloft, Bush swerved from an apparent profanity as he lashed out at Clinton for wanting to surround himself with “all those god-g-g-guys, liberal guys, that were hanging out with him in Oxford while some of you were over there fighting, and have them solve all of the nation’s problems.”

Making that reference to Clinton’s avoidance of military service even more specific in Grand Blanc, he told a crowd that he could not figure out whether a man dressed as a chicken to taunt him for dodging presidential debates wasn’t in fact “talking about the draft.” He went on to deride “those chicken-heads down in Arkansas.”

And he turned biting when asked on board the train about his role in the Iran-Contra affair--the Reagan Administration’s effort to trade weapons for hostages. “I think it’s really odd that when Gov. Clinton gets in trouble with the draft, this old canard is resurrected after five years,” he told CBS.

The trip itself was laced with small reminders that the campaign often seems derailed. In Columbus, Ohio, he praised a local band as the “Purple Pride of Pinkerton; you try to say that.” The high school was in Pickerington. But neither that band nor one that followed could seem to get Bush’s theme music right.

First the “Purple Pride” played “Coming to America,” the Neil Diamond tune that Democrat Michael S. Dukakis used as his 1988 theme song. Then it was the “Age of Aquarius,” the 1960s tribute to psychedelia. At the next stop, in Marysville, the band struck up the strains of a surf-rock hit: “Wipeout.”

CLINTON NOT COMPLACENT

The governor will accelerate his campaign. A4