Clinton Worries Perot May Split Anti-Bush Vote

By JACK NELSON

Oct. 1, 1992 12 AM PT

TIMES WASHINGTON BUREAU CHIEF

WASHINGTON —

Guardedly optimistic as he heads into the final stretch of a long and bruising campaign for the presidency, Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton is concerned that Ross Perot could hurt his chances for victory by splitting the anti-Bush vote, he said in an interview Wednesday.

Moreover, the Democratic presidential nominee expects a final Republican onslaught on his record and is haunted by the specter of the 1976 race, when another unpopular President, Gerald R. Ford, stormed from behind in the final month and almost beat former Gov. Jimmy Carter of Georgia.

“There’s a big majority of people in this country that know that they shouldn’t reelect the President,” Clinton said, but a renewed Perot campaign would split the “anti” vote now united behind the Democratic ticket.

Bush’s standing in the polls has been hovering around 40% for weeks, Clinton noted. “I think that’s one reason that Perot may offer (the GOP) some hope. If you split up the rest of it, 40% looks bigger.”

As for whether Perot will re-enter the race, as he has indicated he may do as early as today, Clinton said, “I don’t have any idea. Part of him wants to run, part of him doesn’t.”

Perot said last July that he would not become an independent candidate for the White House because he had concluded that he could not win and that he did not want to throw the election into the House of Representatives and disrupt the country. But last week he said his withdrawal was a mistake, and on Monday he called together his state coordinators to talk about whether he should run after all.

Regardless of whether Perot wages an active campaign, he could be a factor in the outcome in some pivotal states because of the multimillion-dollar grass-roots effort he bankrolled that put his name on the ballots of all 50 states.

Although “upbeat and optimistic” about his own chances, Clinton predicts that President Bush and his forces will “fight like crazy” to extend their 12-year control of the White House.

“These guys think they own the White House,” he said. “They believe it is their personal property. . . . They can’t imagine what life would be like not owning the White House, and they believe it belongs to them and not to the American people.”

Clinton has held double-digit leads in public opinion polls since mid-July, and some analysts have suggested that he may be headed for a landslide victory. But the governor said he has been involved in too many contests and seen “too much movement right at the end” to be overconfident.

The race is “highly competitive” now with a lot of volatility in it, he said, and he has “hammered” away at his staff not to become complacent.

Since polling of presidential campaigns began in 1936, no candidate has managed to overcome a double-digit lead at this stage of the campaign and win election. But in 1976 Ford was 11 percentage points behind in September and only narrowly lost to Carter, who won 51% of the popular vote to the incumbent’s 48%.

Ford’s campaign was run by James A. Baker III, the man behind Bush’s candidacy now, and Clinton expects that under Baker the Bush campaign forces will make the going “really tough” from here on out.

Clinton and aides at his Little Rock, Ark., campaign headquarters focus on the 1976 race when they discuss Bush’s chances of making what would be one of the greatest comebacks in political history--an upset that would exceed President Harry S. Truman’s legendary victory in 1948, when he overcame a 6-point poll deficit at the end of September to win election over New York Gov. Thomas E. Dewey. Truman’s victory was so narrow and unexpected that the Chicago Tribune headline the day after the election said he had lost.

To discourage complacency among staffers impressed with Clinton’s steady lead in the polls--which has hovered in the neighborhood of 9 to 15 points--Clinton campaign officials have circulated charts showing how Ford narrowed the gap with Carter in the Gallup Poll in the last month of the 1976 campaign. By early October, Carter’s lead, which had been as high as 15 points in late summer, had been cut to 6.

Asked if Baker might be planning to “drop something” on him in the final stages of the campaign, Clinton said, “Maybe. . . . They’ve worked at it steady for a year now, and they’ve done everything they could to take this campaign out. But my campaign is bigger than me now. . . . We’ve been very, very fortunate to have a lot of bipartisan and nonpartisan support.”

If he can keep the campaign focused on the economy and other major issues, Clinton said, “then I can withstand whatever bricks they throw at me and, basically, they’ve pursued that strategy with vigor even back to the (Democratic) primaries.”

The Bush campaign, he said, “may try to do some horrible ad or something” about the draft issue that has plagued him throughout the campaign--efforts he and others made that kept him out of military service during the Vietnam War.

But he said, “I think people have made up their minds about it. I think they feel whatever they’re going to feel about it. The fundamental fact really hasn’t changed since February.”

Given Bush’s record in the Iran-Contra scandal--the Ronald Reagan Administration’s effort to trade arms for hostages and use proceeds of the arms sales to fund the Nicaraguan Contras--Clinton asserted that the President is in a “poor position” to “claim that my inability to answer any further question about what happened 23 years ago is grounds to vote against me.”

The sources for news reports on efforts he and others made to help him escape the draft during the Vietnam War, Clinton said, were Republicans who were “not particularly interested in my getting elected.”

By contrast, he said, evidence questioning whether the President told the truth about his knowledge and involvement in the Iran-Contra affair came from fellow Republicans and members of Bush’s “own team,” including two Reagan Administration Cabinet members, former Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger and former Secretary of State George P. Shultz.

Bush has denied knowing that the deal involved an arms-for-hostages swap, but several former White House aides have disputed the President’s contention.

Clinton, who supported the war to drive Iraqi forces out of Kuwait, said Bush has to be given credit for a victory “well won” and for putting together the international coalition that backed the allied forces.

But in terms of a campaign issue, he said, “you have to offset that . . . by the extraordinary degree to which we played footsie with (Iraqi dictator) Saddam Hussein right up to the time he invaded Kuwait, even after he dropped mustard gas on the Kurds.”

The evidence suggests, he said, “that we gave him some reason to think that he could get away with invading Kuwait.”

Clinton said that, although Bush managed to solidify his base in the GOP at its Houston convention by appealing to the party’s right wing, “he also made a lot people feel like they were uncomfortable with the Republican position.”

“You had guys up there calling for a religious war, saying that people that didn’t agree with them weren’t real Americans. The platform was further right than (President) Reagan’s.”

He criticized “the tone and rhetoric” of the convention, saying “the way they jumped on my wife for two days” backfired. Convention speakers accused Hillary Clinton of being a radical feminist who equated marriage with slavery and wanted to permit children to sue their parents if they didn’t want to do their chores.

The Republican effort against her “offended a lot of people,” Clinton said, although “it got America to take a second look at her, and they liked what they saw. I think it really helped her a lot.”

Clinton called his running mate, Sen. Al Gore of Tennessee, a “real asset” and said he has helped the Democratic ticket throughout the country.

BUSH ON CHILD SUPPORT: He proposes tougher U.S. role in forcing compliance. A20

The Duel Over Debates

Here are the two current proposals for debates, offered by the Commission on Presidential Debates and President Bush:

COMMISSION OFFER

Presidential debate

Sept. 21, East Lansing, Mich.

Oct. 4, San Diego.

Oct. 15, Richmond, Va.

Format: Single moderator

Vice presidential debate: Sept. 29, Louisville, Ky.

BUSH OFFER