Despite Texas Swings, Bush Not the Lone Star in His Home State : The President is locked in a dead heat with Clinton, and with fellow Texan Perot in the contest now, the home field advantage is split.

President Bush arrives in Texas Wednesday for a two-day trip that testifies both to the power of his office--and the precariousness of his hold on it.

Bush is due in San Antonio to sign the North American Free Trade Agreement Wednesday in a triumphant ceremony with Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

But the trip, which marks Bush’s sixth visit to Texas since the Republican National Convention in Houston in August, also underscores a more bitter fact: One month before Election Day, Bush still hasn’t sewn up his home state, a state he cannot win without.

“Bush has to compete for Texas,” says Stephen L. Klineberg, a pollster and sociologist at Rice University in Houston. “Today the overwhelming belief here is that we are headed for more difficult times, and we’re going in the wrong direction. It’s just a hard sell for an incumbent President.”

Four years ago, Bush carried 56% of the vote in Texas; but private polls completed last week found Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton running in a virtual dead heat. And now the President must wrestle with a new complication: the entry into the race of Dallas billionaire Ross Perot, who many Republicans fear will draw more votes from Bush than from Clinton in Texas.

But no one is certain how well Perot will run--the latest private surveys give him about one-sixth of the vote in Texas--or which of the two major candidates he will hurt.

Brian J. Berry, the Bush campaign’s regional political director, dismisses questions about Perot’s impact with a wave of his hand. On balance, Berry predicts, Perot might hurt Clinton more than Bush, but he suspects the billionaire’s impact will be slight in any case.

One prominent Democratic strategist, who asked not to be identified, says that if Perot attracts less than 15% of the statewide vote, he will draw more from the suburban Dallas and Houston voters otherwise likely to favor Bush than from rural or blue-collar Texans who might lean toward Clinton. Above 15%, the strategist said, Perot would be pulling from Clinton’s base.

All of these calculations are somewhat confectionary, spun less from hard fact than sugary hopes. But the bottom line is that Perot adds more uncertainty to a state the GOP expected to have locked down by now.

That turbulence was apparent in conversations Sunday with families strolling through the huge Texas State Fair in Dallas. Amid the livestock contests and the chili cook-offs, strong opinions emerged on all three candidates, and little of it was anything they would quote in a campaign brochure.

Conversations with more than 30 voters from around the state found some residual support for Perot, but not much.

Doug Fortenberry, who sells oil field equipment in Mabank, still likes the idea of electing a businessman. “I think that’s what the country needs,” he says. Phil McAllister, a Dallas barber, favors Perot because he is the only candidate “who is man enough to address the federal budget deficit.”

But these opinions were straws against a gale of negative sentiments. It is as if Perot violated a frontier code of manhood by withdrawing from the race in July; here, perhaps as strongly as anywhere, Perot has been branded as a quitter who couldn’t take the heat.

Phil Casada, an agricultural science teacher from the Dallas suburb of Farmersville, dismissed Perot curtly: “I think the gentleman cannot handle pressure.”

This spring, David King, an oil and gas operator from Brenham who worries about the economy and Democratic support for expensive social programs, had been prepared to vote for Perot. No more. “I think if he gets mad as President, he’d just take his marbles and go home,” says King, who now leans reluctantly toward Bush.

Few here gave much credibility to Perot’s claim that he returned only because his volunteers summoned him. “I think the guy is an egomaniac,” says Patricia Shires of Dallas.

Fortenberry’s wife, Monica--a third-grade teacher who used to work for Electronic Data Systems, the computer services company Perot founded--worries that Perot’s temperament may be unsuited for public office. “He’s used to doing things his own way, and I don’t know if he could work with Congress,” she says. Monica Fortenberry’s hesitation is near-universal among teachers and other educators here: Few think much of the education reforms Perot pushed through the Legislature in the early 1980s.

Private Democratic polls have found a majority of Texans disapprove of Bush’s job performance, and that lack of enthusiasm was as pungent Sunday as the aroma of searing beef. Hardly anyone defended Bush’s economic record with much vigor, though many were sympathetic to his argument that the Democratic Congress deserves much of the blame.

“I know Bush hasn’t done what everybody thinks he ought to, but he’s done about as much as he can with the Congress he has,” says Corky Ragland, a teacher from Wills Point, a small town in East Texas.

The free trade agreement that Bush will sign Wednesday--and Clinton endorsed with qualifications Sunday--generated little interest and even less enthusiasm. “All it’s going to do is take jobs out of the United States and send them straight to Mexico,” said Pat Main, a railroad conductor from Lovelady.

But even many of those lukewarm about Bush intend to vote for him again, largely because of entrenched suspicion about Democrats.

Some of those mingling on the midway Sunday raised questions about Clinton’s integrity and “his problem with the girls,” as one put it. But opposition to Clinton was less personal than generic: It centered on the belief that Democrats inexorably will raise taxes to fund expensive social programs for the poor and minorities.

“I’m disappointed in Bush, but Clinton is going to give it all away,” said Barbara Horton of Nacogdoches, a small city in the pivotal rural region of East Texas. “A lot of people make more off welfare than the rest of us who work.”

Last week, the GOP launched a major wave of television ads accusing Clinton of planning to raise taxes on the middle class; they joined radio ads branding him as a tax-and-spend liberal more profligate than New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo. That’s not a hard sell to many here.

And yet for all the personal and ideological discomfort with Clinton, unhappiness with the economy has opened a hole for him. Texas’ economy hasn’t suffered the precipitous declines of New Jersey or California in the last four years: Even with nearly a one-percentage-point increase in unemployment last month to 7.7%, joblessness is about the same as when Bush took office.

But Klineberg’s polls, and conversations here Sunday, point to a fear that the state’s economy is caught in a low-growth spiral that will inexorably constrict opportunity. Steve Perry, a finance officer for a car dealership outside Ft. Worth, voted for Bush four years ago but is switching to Clinton because he considers the President to be out of touch with the middle class’s economic strains. “I think he needs to go to work in a grocery store and sack some groceries for a year,” he said of the President.

Will such defections among white swing voters be enough to bring Texas within Clinton’s reach?

Matthew Dowd, a demographics expert and Democratic consultant, calculates the math this way: Clinton can depend on overwhelming support among blacks and Latinos, who constitute about one-fifth of the statewide vote. In an ordinary two-way race, that means Clinton would need to win about 41% of the white vote to take Texas; but in a three-way race with Perot, Clinton could carry the state with about one-third of white votes.

That’s not as easy as it might sound: In just a two-way contest, Michael S. Dukakis won only 34% of the white vote here in 1988, and Walter F. Mondale just 27% in 1984. To seriously push for more, Clinton would have to invest $2 million in media here, Dowd estimates.

So far, Clinton’s national campaign has been willing to spend only enough to compel Bush to spend here himself. Though Democrats have provided substantial national funds for a get-out-the-vote drive, early ad buys for the Clinton effort have been “modest,” insiders admit; Robin Rorapaugh, Clinton’s state coordinator, learned Monday morning that, while she would receive more generic advertising from Democratic National Committee funds, the campaign had decided not to commit any of its own money in directly responding to Bush’s ads here.

Looking at such calculations, Berry dismisses the Democratic effort here as “typical smoke and mirrors.” Not all Democrats disagree.

But even with moderate investment of time and money, Clinton has stayed within range in Texas. If Clinton can stay close through Bush’s current advertising barrage, the Democrats’ chances will remain strong through the end, insists Kirk Adams, director of the party’s coordinated Unity ’92 field effort. “The next 10 days are going to be critical.”

Mixed Economic Signals in Texas

Bush’s economic record is a sore spot with Texans, though many seem sympathetic to his argument that the Democratic Congress deserves much of the blame.

Unemployment Sept., 1992: 7.7% Jan., 1989: 7.1% *

Income Change in personal income, January, 1989 to January, 1992: Up 2.9% *

Poverty rate 1992: 15.9% 1988: 18.0% *

Past presidential races

GOP Dems 1988 X 1984 X 1980 X 1976 X