Naysayers Plot Their Path to Future Glory : Opponents: Perotists, conservatives and those on the fringe converge on the Democrats’ party and look to ’96 as Clinton cautions on using anger wisely.

The pilgrims are drawing near to Canterbury, and the leading roles have long since been cast in this Chaucerian morality play on the Potomac. There are the President and his lady, his knights and squires, his chancellor and treasurers--oh, so many treasurers.

Yet there are other, lesser players who needs must fill the back rows of the stage. Just as there is no good drama without small parts, there is no good politics without small partisans, the loyal opposition, the disgruntled, the other-party poopers, who stand apart and, for good or ill, feed the eternal flame of naysaying.

Here follow the Third, Fourth and Fifth Tales.

The Malcontents’ Tale

What thyng we may nat lightly have

Thereafter wol we crie alday and crave

Bill Clinton was not even President yet, and already they gathered.

Two-score Perotists--a cheeky rump group calling itself the Perot Voters National Inaugural Committee that finds the lobbying agenda of United We Stand, America, Inc. too limiting--were getting together with the Natural Law Party’s presidential standardbearer (you remember him, John Hagelin; 37,137 of you voted for him) and the New Alliance Party’s Lenora B. Fulani (73,248 votes) on Tuesday. Mindful that more than 20 million people cast not-for-Bush-or-Clinton votes, they agreed in principle that what this country needs is a good third party.

Whether they agree on much else they have yet to discover. Nor was it clear whether the earnest suburbanites who had labored for Perot understood exactly who they were sojourning with in the litigious and by-no-means-mainstream Fulani.

The gathering got no imprimatur from the Lone Star--that is, Perot, not Texas. “We have tried to discourage them from these activities. We do not feel they are appropriate. This is President-elect Clinton’s time,” said Perot spokeswoman Sharon Holman, steely-voiced.

But they began planning this on Nov. 4, says Bob Anderson of San Dimas, Calif., who raised money and votes for Perot in Los Angeles and, like the others, paid his own way to come here.

They staged three policy summits here on such matters as health care, homelessness and democracy. At each, like Dish Night at the movies during the Depression, everyone took home a suitably marked piece of china or glassware.

And they got a Senate reception room overlooking the Capitol dome to meet in, thanks to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who reserved it for them. “There are 2 million Perot voters in California and (Feinstein’s) going to have to run again in two years,” Perot group spokesman Gene Waldman said with some satisfaction.

One New York congressman, whose reelection campaign was endorsed by Fulani, came by and spoke briefly in the cavernous room. Fulani’s entourage, about a dozen men from a New York homeless shelter, sat along the broad window. One or two men floating near the wine bar looked suspiciously like that breed of scrawny Capitol Hill aides who often get their stimulants and nutrients by drifting from reception to reception.

Nor was the naysaying confined to Perot backers and the fringe perennials like Fulani.

Across the Potomac, conservatives will sulk at their not-the-inauguration mope-in tonight. The Counter Inaugural Ball in Alexandria, Va., is a $75 bargain--the cost of a couple of official Clinton sweatshirts.

It promises to be a deliberately dour gala, co-sponsored by Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) and former Education Secretary William J. Bennett. About 300 up-and-coming or down-and-going conservatives, choose your political direction, were expected to toast the king across the water--or the river, wherever their new leader may be waiting.

Conservative Morton Blackwell, who heads a group that trains young people for political careers, organized such a bash in 1977 for the Carter inaugural. “We knew then that we were the government in waiting. The Reagan Administration was the natural result of that conservative ball,” he said. “Now we’ll be looking forward to 1996.”

Such counter-celebrations are on the verge of becoming a tradition, if there is such a thing in this country: Jesse Jackson organized counter-galas during the Republican years, decrying “vulgar expressions of ostentatiousness.”

Surprisingly, not all the Democrats find their joy in being on the winning side unalloyed:

“After 12 years of being able to laugh at the President,” said a high Clinton transition official this week, already sounding like he had embarked on a Rolaids diet, “now I feel this enormous personal responsibility for things if they go wrong. It’s not the same lighthearted feeling that if he screws up, we can laugh.”

The Fat Cats’ Tale

Lat take a cat, and forstre hym wel with milk

And tendre flessh, and make his couche of silk

Speaking of vulgar demonstrations of ostentatiousness . . . are we for them or against them?

Four rowdy fellows drove down from western Massachusetts and did themselves up as the conscience of the checkbooks: the fat cats of insurance, banking, tobacco and medicine.

Padded out with overfed bellies, twitching feline ears and tails, they scattered fake cash and cigar ash about them as they pounced on liberal pashas alighting from limousines at the Mayflower Hotel. “The best President money can buy!” they mocked. “Who do you think pays for these inaugurations? We do!”

The brash reminder of what it is that really makes those limos go is the inaugural gift of a carpenter, a student, an environmental activist and a union organizer.

This being Washington, even the disaffected have press releases. Kevin Morrissey was kind enough to let Bill Clinton off the hook in his as “a victim of this corrupt system. He is in the impossible position of having to represent both the interests of the American public and the interests of the wealthy elite who financed his campaign.”

The Bad Angel’s Tale

Ful wys is he that kan himselven knowe!

Standing before the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday, Bill Clinton urged Americans to be guided by “the good angels of our nature.”

But on Tuesday, the President-elect admitted to Mr. Rogers, the cardiganed father confessor of children’s television, that those celestial mentors have not always perched upon his own shoulder. The new leader of the free world, on whose every choler and mood the world will hang, revealed that as a boy, he got angry and “sometimes I did stupid things . . . oh, kick the ground or smash my hand into a wall or throw a ball or throw a bat or something. But, as I got older, I learned to try to take a deep breath and . . . count to 10 before I said anything when I was angry.

“It’s not a bad thing to be angry, you know. Sometimes, there are things worth being angry about. . . . But when you’re angry, if you are in control of your anger and you do something good, that’s one thing. But if you let your anger get control of you, that’s bad,” he intoned.