Clinton Not Qualified to Lead U.S., Perot Says : Campaign: At rally and in TV spot, Texan departs from usual attack on Bush to blister Democratic foe.

Ross Perot, who until now has seemed single-mindedly devoted to denying reelection to President Bush, on Sunday unloaded on Bill Clinton as unqualified “through background and experience” to lead the nation.

At rallies in Long Beach and Santa Clara and in a blistering half-hour television “infomercial” broadcast on two networks Sunday night, Perot cited a numbing list of statistics about Arkansas’ record on income, economic growth, education, the environment and social welfare under Clinton’s stewardship as governor.

Before 12,000 screaming, stomping supporters at the Long Beach Arena, Perot also raised the Democratic presidential nominee’s youthful experimentation with marijuana and hinted that Clinton lacks the “moral and ethical standards” required of a public servant.

“Do you think it is appropriate to have senior government officials who have used drugs?” he demanded.

“No!” the crowd thundered.

Perot again scored Bush for alleged mismanagement of the savings and loan crisis and ridiculed the President for claiming credit for the end of the Cold War.

He said that neither Bush nor Clinton was qualified to operate a small company, let alone a superpower.

“If you had a small business, would you hire either one of these guys to run it?” Perot asked. The huge arena crowd responded in chorus: “No!”

In a speech that ran nearly 90 minutes, he urged his followers to reject both major-party nominees and give him a mandate “so we can take our country back.”

But despite the crowd’s energy, as Perot’s lengthy speech continued the audience began to leave. By the time he finished, about 2,000 seats were empty.

He gave a similar speech to between 7,000 and 8,000 people in Santa Clara later.

His 30-minute TV ad, dubbed “Chicken Feathers, Deep Voodoo and the American Dream,” triggered a detailed response from the Clinton camp, which called it a “multimillion-dollar smoke screen” that “takes the ‘info’ out of ‘infomercial.’ ”

Perot cast the election as a choice between “chicken man,” “potato chip man” and himself. He called Clinton “chicken man” because poultry is a leading industry in Arkansas; he referred to Bush as “potato chip man” because one of the President’s top advisers was once quoted as saying he did not care whether the United States produced computer chips or potato chips.

“If we were just planning a picnic instead of trying to plan a future for our children, chicken and potato chips might be exactly what we need,” he said. “But in the serious business of our country’s future and our children’s future, isn’t it fascinating that we have two of the three contenders who just don’t have any business experience or money management experience . . .?”

Perot contended that neither Clinton nor Bush fully appreciates the importance of creating jobs in industries such as microelectronics, biotechnology, telecommunications, computers and robotics--which he described as “industries of the future.”

Perot said the only bright spot in Arkansas’ economy was the growth of the poultry industry, which he said accounted for one of every five jobs created in Arkansas over the last 12 years. But, Perot said, “this is not an industry of tomorrow.”

He also said that Arkansas ranked at or near the bottom of the national scale on violent crime, wages, high school graduation rates and overall environmental quality. Perot’s United We Stand organization issued a fact sheet supporting his attack on Arkansas, citing statistics from the Census Bureau, the Institute for Southern Studies, the National Education Assn. and the Sourcebook of Criminal Justice Statistics.

In addition, Perot quoted from an editorial in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette of Little Rock, which did not endorse a candidate for President. Perot said the paper said that Clinton had left the state’s Department of Human Services in disarray, that he had to be sued before he did anything about abused and neglected children, that his environmental polices “add up to little more than delay and neglect” and that he left the state’s tax policies “more regressive than ever.”

Clinton’s communications director, George Stephanopoulos, issued a point-by-point rebuttal to Perot’s charges. He said that Arkansas leads the nation in job growth and income growth, that it has the highest graduation rate in the South, that the state’s dropout rate has decreased, that its air and water are among the purest in the nation, that the authors of an environmental study Perot relied upon have criticized Bush’s use of it against Clinton as “devious and dishonest,” and that poultry-processing jobs account for only 3% of the state’s total.

Stephanopoulos added that the Little Rock newspaper’s editorial had some nasty things to say about Perot as well: “Ross Perot? Strange man. . . . His appetite for squirrelly conspiracy theories amounts to a craving. How would you like to have a president whose eyes narrow whenever he serves up some yarn from Fantastic Spy Stories?”

Most of the thousands in the Long Beach Arena were committed Perot backers, but at least a few remained uncertain two days before the election.

Peggy Topp, a Long Beach housewife, said that she came to the rally because she could not decide between Perot and Bush.

After hearing Perot speak, she said she “probably” would support the independent “because he’s for the people and I like that.”

Mario Borunda, who runs an upholstery shop in Norwalk, said he was undecided before attending Sunday’s rally, but he is “pretty sure now” he will vote for Perot.

“I’m a Democrat all the time, but not this year,” Borunda said.

After the rally, an incident involving Perot supporters and a local television reporter occurred outside. Linda Douglass, political reporter for KNBC-TV, tried to deliver a live summation of Perot’s speech when she was surrounded by 50 to 75 angry Perot supporters who chanted, “We want Perot” and “Tell the truth.”

They surrounded the station’s live transmission truck and began to rock it. Police kept their distance, but other reporters came to Douglass’ aid. An angry half-hour dispute ensued between members of the media and Perot supporters, until a Perot staffer came out and urged the crowd to disperse.

At a short press conference after the Santa Clara rally, Perot apologized. “If that happened, I apologize to the reporter,” he said.

Although Clinton took the brunt of Perot’s fire in the television spot, the Dallas tycoon reserved a fair measure of disdain for Bush.

“The President, in all candor, ignored our economy as vice president and President,” Perot said. “As President, repeatedly, he said we were not in a recession. You knew we were in a recession, you were out of work. I knew we were in a recession. Everybody that can count knew we were in a recession.”

He blasted the Bush Administration for its “hands-off, closed-eyed, hands-over-the-ears management” of the country and the economy. And he said that Bush had refused to accept any responsibility for the nation’s ills.

As he may have exaggerated the flaws of Clinton’s management of Arkansas, the Dallas tycoon also may have stretched the truth in describing the foreign policy failings of the President.

He said in the television commercial that Saddam Hussein remains in power in Baghdad with his nuclear, chemical and biological capabilities intact. The U.N. team responsible for monitoring these programs says that Hussein’s military capabilities have been set back a decade or more.

Perot also accused Bush of cozying up to President Hafez Assad of Syria, whom he said bore responsibility for the Beirut embassy bombing in 1983 and the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988, which killed 270 people. But U.S. intelligence agencies have never been able to prove a direct link between Damascus and these terrorist acts.

On Sunday, the Perot campaign also released a page from the diary of Sybil Stockdale, wife of Perot’s vice presidential running mate James B. Stockdale, which purportedly supports Perot’s claim that he withdrew from the presidential contest in July because of GOP threats against his daughter.

In Mrs. Stockdale’s diary entry for July 16, the date of Perot’s withdrawal, she writes that Perot called to say he was quitting the race that morning. “He said it’s really because Press will expose dirt on his daughter who’ll be married in late Aug, but that’s confidential,” she wrote.

Perot said a week ago on “60 Minutes” and in a newspaper interview that Republican dirty tricksters were planning to embarrass his daughter Carolyn with a faked photograph and disrupt her wedding. He said he quit the race in July to protect her and re-entered after her August wedding passed without incident.

Meanwhile, there was new reason to question whether all of the people who have pledged to be Perot electors would actually vote for him in the Electoral College.

Robert Oban, a Perot elector in Wyoming who has defected to Clinton, contacted news organizations on Sunday to say that he had polled 156 Perot electors and had found 30 of them who were either undecided or opposed to Perot.

In a letter to all Perot’s electors written Oct. 28, Oban called upon them to reconsider their choice. He said he now questions whether Perot could provide “the stable leadership our nation needs during this crucial time.”

“I am concerned about Ross Perot’s persistent pattern of unwillingness to substantiate the allegations which he has against the other candidates and parties, his inability to control his temper, his continuous grandstanding of emotional topics in an attempt to influence voter reasoning, and his failure to provide adequate answers to questions raised in the press,” Oban wrote.