Bush Calls Votes for Perot Wasted : Campaign: The independent candidate starts to show unexpected strength in polls. President says billionaire came ‘from the fringe’ and offers ‘some nutty ideas.’

With the independent campaign of Ross Perot now showing unexpected strength, President Bush on Thursday shifted his sights to a maverick candidate his aides had once hoped to ignore.

Asserting that Perot espoused “some nutty ideas” and came “from the fringe,” Bush contended in a television interview that Americans who cast their support for the Texan would only waste their votes.

Aides to Bush and Gov. Bill Clinton, the Democratic nominee, have acknowledged that Perot has begun to draw strongly from their ranks, and the President’s words appeared to reflect a hope that a blunt warning might help to draw wayward Republican voters home.

Bush continued to direct his harshest words at front-runner Clinton and voiced renewed scorn for the polls that show him trailing badly in his reelection bid. Hopping by helicopter across New Jersey, he preached a message of defiant optimism, assuring 19,000 people who packed a ball field here that “something’s happening out there; we’re moving up on this guy.”

But Bush also sounded new bitterness against the newspaper and television reporting he is said to regard as unrelentingly hostile to his cause. As cameras clicked away at the brilliant outdoor rally, he grabbed and held aloft a bright red bumper sticker advocating his reelection as a way to “annoy the media.”

And while his aides confronted what some described as the renewed prospect of a true three-man race, Bush mixed his on-air warnings about Perot with ever-harsher on-stage rhetoric about Clinton, in which he also seemed to portray the choice facing the nation in apocalyptic terms.

To supporters who cheered his words in a Trenton airport hangar, Bush proclaimed that “12 days from today, the fate of the nation and indeed the Free World is in your hands.” He intensified his efforts to portray Clinton as a rival lacking in character, stating pointedly that a presidential aspirant “cannot lie, and you can’t be all things to all people.”

The most recent national surveys show Clinton commanding a wide lead over Bush and Perot. An NBC-Wall Street Journal poll released Thursday night showed Clinton claiming 47% of the vote, with Bush at 28% and Perot at 19%. The CNN-USA Today poll, combining three nightly samples from after the debate Monday night through Wednesday night, showed Clinton with 44%, Bush 32% and Perot 17%.

That Perot has nevertheless become an increasing preoccupation for the White House is clearly reflected in a newly revised Bush campaign schedule that calls for a weekend trip to South Dakota and Montana, states in which the Texas billionaire is running particularly well.

White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater and other aides attempted Thursday to minimize the significance of Bush’s criticisms of Perot, noting that he made his comments in response to questions during a live CBS television interview.

And Vice President Dan Quayle, campaigning by bus through staunchly Republican rural Ohio, insisted on Thursday that Bush is engaged in a two-man race with Clinton and that Perot is not a factor.

“I intend to focus on Bill Clinton,” Quayle said during a press conference at the Lima Army Tank Plant. “I’m not going to discuss Ross Perot at all. He’s the third candidate. The race is between George Bush and Bill Clinton, not George Bush and Ross Perot.”

But White House aides acknowledged that Perot was now clearly stealing votes from Bush as well as from Clinton, a development frustrating to onetime White House hopes that, in returning to the race, Perot might act as a wedge to pry support from the Arkansas governor.

Increasingly wary Democrats have warned openly in recent days of the danger that Perot could pose to Clinton’s election bid. But some aides have acknowledged that their words are intended in part to ward off complacency among those who might begin to take a Democratic victory for granted.

Fitzwater insisted Thursday that the Democrats’ uneasiness had been prompted also by signs that Bush might be reclaiming their support. But he conceded that the turbulence Perot’s return brought to the presidential race had not yet benefited the Republicans in the way the White House had hoped.

“That could still happen,” Fitzwater contended. But he conceded that, for now, “Perot’s hurting both candidates.”

In the morning television interview, conducted from the state fairgrounds in Raleigh, N.C., Bush said of Perot: “I don’t think he can possibly win.” And while he praised Perot’s plain-spoken diagnosis of the nation’s economic ills, including its $330-billion budget deficit, he described the independent candidate as “long on the problem and very short on the answer.”

Speaking at the beginning of a grueling campaign day, Bush said America’s problems are a “little more complicated” than Perot’s folksy promise of “opening a hood, sticking your head in there and saying, “I’ll fix it.’ ”

“He’s got some good ideas and he’s got some nutty ideas,” Bush said. Recalling Perot’s unfounded assertion Monday night last week that Bush had given Saddam Hussein permission to take over the northern part of Kuwait, the President suggested that his independent rival was “kind of coming in from the fringe.”

While Perot continues to trail Bush in most surveys, polls taken in the aftermath of the three debates suggest that Perot’s support has almost doubled and the two major candidates’ standings have at best remained constant. Perot, who has said he will spend $60 million on his election bid, is airing television advertisements telling voters that it is “no time to waste our votes on politics as usual.”

But Bush, whose hopes for victory in Texas, Florida and the Rocky Mountain states would now appear to be founded in large part on the prospect that he could reclaim support from Perot, responded in kind. “I don’t think people want to waste their votes,” he said of Perot’s candidacy, “and that’s exactly what it would be.”

With his four stops in New Jersey, including an appearance in a televised voter forum, Bush persisted in a grueling campaign schedule whose late-night return to the White House marked one of just two times that he will sleep in Washington between now and Election Day.

At every opportunity, Bush continued to urge voters to disregard what he termed the “crazy polls,” while surrogates like Rep. Marge Roukema of New Jersey echoed that disdain. To shouts of “No!” the congresswoman challenged the crowd here: “Have you ever been polled by a pollster?”

Bush also refused to discuss the prospect that current trends might hold. “If I started talking hypothetically about if I lose,” he told CBS’ Harry Smith, “I would undermine what I’ve got inside of me, the spirit that takes it to the American people. And I’m not going to do it.”

If his spirits did not seem to lag, however, his command of syntax and language sometimes suffered over the course of the day. He prefaced one attack on Clinton here by confiding to the audience: “I want to run the risk of ruining what is a lovely recession--a lovely reception.”

With the half-hour CBS interview, and continuing with the evening forum, he began what aides say will be his most intensive effort to use free television as an aid to his reelection bid.

That such appeals can require compromises were particularly evident on New Jersey’s WWOR-TV Thursday night as Bush was confronted with a string of mostly hostile questions, finding himself at one point debating the definition of a recession with a free-lance photographer.

Times staff writer John Broder contributed to this story from Ohio.