TV Probes the Rise of Candidates : Television: PBS’ ‘Frontline’ and two CNN specials fill in gaps in the lives of George Bush and Bill Clinton.

You saw them on the same stage with that feisty little Texas firecracker Ross Perot. And now these “two white-hot arcs of ambition”--as journalist Richard Ben Cramer describes George Bush and Bill Clinton--are flashing toward the presidential finish line.

“The Choice ‘92”--a two-hour “Frontline” special airing at 9 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28, at 8 on KPBS-TV Channel 15 and at 7 on KVCR-TV Channel 24--may not make up any minds or change any votes. But it does very compellingly fill some gaps while affirming that there are no white knights riding tall in this presidential campaign. The same message comes through in a pair of CNN biographies about the candidates.

“Frontline” said that it will explain tonight that Perot is excluded from the program because it was assembled largely before his late re-entry into the race and that he rejected an offer for a separate interview that would have been attached as an addendum.

Produced by Thomas Lennon and narrated and reported by Cramer, “The Choice ‘92” uses numerous clips and interviews to interweave the stories of Bush and Clinton into a tight braid. Omitted from these biographies are Clinton nemesis Gennifer Flowers and the Irangate, Iraqgate, Chinagate and Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill controversies that have nagged Bush.

A CNN biography of Clinton that aired last Sunday did cover the Flowers soap opera and was more judgmental than “Frontline” about Clinton’s Vietnam draft revisionism. And CNN’s program on Bush this Sunday at 7 p.m. virtually impales the President on his present and past China policy.

CNN correspondent Ken Bode: “Even as the Chinese were rounding up the survivors of Tian An Men Square, Bush equivocated. Official American policy gave no support to the democracy movement; instead, by diplomatic back channel, the President dealt with the tyrannical old leadership.” And has continued to do so.

George (Poppy) Bush was shaped and polished by privilege. Billy Clinton was reared in a much more modest home where his alcoholic stepfather beat his mother. What emerges from these biographies, however, are two men who--despite charging down different political roads--intersect on the issue of trustworthiness. And it’s not necessarily a pretty picture.

At 32, Clinton was the nation’s youngest governor. At 34--after offending the conservative Arkansas political and business Establishment with his aggressive reform agenda and abrasive tactics--he was the nation’s youngest ex-governor.

He was crushed by his defeat at the polls. Yet we hear that the Clinton reelected in 1982 was a changed man, a “consensus” governor whose bona fide achievements in the state would be at least partially eclipsed by his propensity to compromise on principle and abandon causes that offended his powerful political backers.

Despite retaining his populist rhetoric, Clinton “was prepared to do business with the very industries he opposed,” CNN’s Bode said.

They included the poultry industry, which created pollution along with jobs. When 90% of northwest Arkansas streams were found to be unfit for human contact in 1990, Clinton created an animal waste task force. But 24 of its 27 members were “agribusiness insiders,” Cramer says on “Frontline.”

Compromise is necessary in politics, a Clinton critic adds. “But when you make compromises so often and so deeply that people begin to wonder, ‘Is there anything you stand for that you won’t compromise?’ then you’ve gone too far.”

Or as Bode said: “Bill Clinton takes a strong stand, but gives ground if he runs into serious opposition.”

The same reputation has trailed Bush, whose personal aversion to racial discrimination, Cramer says, did not stop him from publicly opposing the 1964 Civil Rights Act during a failed run for a Texas congressional seat. Victorious two years later, he supported President Lyndon Johnson’s open housing bill, reversing his earlier resistance only “when it was clear it would pass,” Bode says. Later as President, Bush vetoed a 1990 civil rights bill, then signed a slightly revised one a year later.

A one-time supporter of women’s “freedom to choose or not choose abortion,” moreover, Bush did a “sudden and dramatic U-turn on abortion” just to pass the conservative litmus test and get on the 1984 Republican ticket with Ronald Reagan, Bode asserts. And the rest is history.

Meanwhile, voters will write a new chapter of history when voting next month for the chameleon of their choice. “Self-reinvention--it’s what George Bush is attempting now,” Cramer says. “It’s what Bill Clinton has been accused of doing all his life.”

Politicians.

VOTE MILLIE. Is an estimated audience turnout of up to 85 million viewers for each of the presidential debates a positive sign that America is headed for a whopping voter turnout in November? That remains to be seen.

Just as big a question is whether voters got hard, useful information from the debates rather than the usual, superficial impressions of the candidates’ personalities and abilities to perform under pressure.

Let’s hope so, for the electorate clearly could use some enlightenment.

Despite a general impression that the media have been performing better in 1992 than during the 1988 campaign, Americans are still poorly informed about the issues and the way their federal government operates, according to a nationwide survey of 601 “randomly selected likely voters” commissioned by the liberal media watchdog group Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting. The survey was supervised by two professors from the University of Massachusetts Center for the Study of Communication.

How uninformed is the electorate? In a question about government spending, only 22% of those surveyed correctly identified military disbursement as a major budget item, while 42% named foreign aid and 30% cited welfare as the No. 1 budget expenditure. Actually, each of the latter consumes but a tiny fraction of the federal budget.

What is the explanation for this fuzziness? The pollsters pointedly note that most of the respondents reported that TV news was their primary source of information, so draw your own conclusions.

On the positive side, 86% of those surveyed did know that the Bush family has a dog named Millie, and 89% could identify Murphy Brown as the TV character attacked by Vice President Dan Quayle.

And these days, thanks to endless TV interviews with dissembling partisan pundits, voters know the “winners” and “losers” of each debate.

KCAL-TV Channel 9’s Josh Mankiewicz to Clinton spinner Mandy Grunwald and Bush spinner Charles Black after Monday’s candidate forum: “All right, who won and who lost?” Ending the incredible suspense, Grunwald revealed that Clinton did swell while Black, wearing his usual straight face, was certain that Bush’s performance “really turned around” the campaign.

Mankiewicz: “Do you think . . . “

Click.