Perot’s New TV Spot May Offer a Look at His Political Plans : Media: The 30-minute commercial signals that the Texas billionaire intends to keep up the pressure on Clinton and Congress.

The charts and graphs and folksy analogies will be just like before.

But when Ross Perot goes on national television for a half-hour political commercial Sunday evening, the underlying message will be new: He’s back and he plans to stick around.

Nearly five months since the election that some thought would end his political presence, the third-place presidential candidate has proved himself more influential in defeat than many thought possible.

Now, using his checkbook and his still substantial public following, he is mapping a strategy to keep up the pressure for enactment of his agenda of deficit-cutting and political reforms.

“We’re organizing in every town and city, every congressional district in the country,” Perot said Thursday, just after a sold-out lunch appearance at the National Press Club in Washington.

Since January, the Dallas billionaire has been beating the drum for his political organization, chatting with talk-show hosts and crisscrossing the nation for personal appearances, often drawing overflow crowds. Last weekend, the tour brought him to California.

But his latest plans offer the best glimpse yet of how Perot hopes to keep up the pressure on Congress and the White House through the critical first months of the Clinton Administration and the buildup to the 1994 elections.

Those plans suggest that, whether Perot ends up shaping a third political party or using his current effort as a springboard for a 1996 presidential run, he already has decided that he will do all he can to apply the populist energies he unleashed during last year’s election.

“Forecasting what Ross Perot will do is like charting the path of a tornado,” said Frank Luntz, the Republican pollster who worked for Perot during the campaign year. “But you can be sure that it won’t take any predictable course and that the goal will be to keep the pressure on.”

Perot’s new strategy has the same quirky, ad hoc quality as events Perot used during the campaign, events that sometimes worked beyond the experts’ expectations.

The centerpiece is what he is calling “the first national referendum”--a 30-minute commercial that will be broadcast on the NBC television network Sunday at 8 p.m. PST and will focus on the grab-bag of political reforms proposed by Perot and his group, United We Stand, America, Inc.

Written by Perot himself and taped last Monday, the show represents the “electronic town hall” concept that he often discussed during the campaign as a new form of democracy for the video age.

Although the name seems to suggest a studio audience and some live give-and-take over public policy, the show will have a cast of one: Perot, who will sit behind his oak desk with charts and graphs.

The public is supposed to take part in Sunday’s show through a 17-item questionnaire that Perot has been distributing through ads in TV Guide magazine, mailings to media outlets and distributions by his volunteers.

The results will be tabulated by state and congressional district--to ensure that members of Congress know just how many voters share these views.

As during the campaign, Perot maintains that he has no personal agenda and is only following the lead of his volunteers.

The questionnaire asks for up-or-down votes on the reforms that Perot has advocated in his personal appearances: a line-item budget veto for the President, a balanced-budget amendment to the Constitution, federal budget cuts, elimination of official perks, abolition of political action committees and limits on campaign spending and lobbying.

Perot is paying the costs of this first show himself: approximately $800,000 after taxes, he says, including $300,000 for the TV Guide advertising and $400,000 for costs associated with the commercial.

For a more rigorous view of the public attitudes about his proposals, he also is paying pollster Gordon Black for two separate public-opinion surveys next week. And Perot says he might do similar TV programs each month and perhaps also start a “Pork of the Month” program to publicize egregious government waste.

“Get ready,” he said.

As during the campaign, the size of Perot’s political organization is somewhat mysterious: Perot says that he will not release membership figures until they reach an unspecified critical mass, although he insists they are “huge.”

But if the size of his volunteer army is unclear, there is little question that he has so far maintained his pre-election drawing power. Several polls show that since the campaign ended, Perot’s favorable ratings roughly have doubled to about two-thirds of those surveyed.

His appearances over the past six weekends have been magnets. Crowds stood in subzero weather in Maine and Colorado and overflowed from meeting halls in stop after stop elsewhere.

Still, some analysts wonder whether the public’s interest in the Texan will prove boundless. If his national TV appearances become too frequent, his pungent rhetoric “could start wearing thin,” said Stephen Hess, political analyst at the liberal Brookings Institution here. “He has to worry about playing too long at the highest note of the scale.”

Some analysts see Perot’s influence--or at least the influence of the Perotist movement--as one of the most important things that has happened in Washington since the inauguration.

They assert that it is at least partly responsible for President Clinton’s deficit-cutting proposals, for his reductions in White House staff and perks, and for his call to streamline government and limit the lobbying of his appointees.

Some analysts argue that Perot’s influence is also visible in Congress’ recent pay freeze and staff reductions, in the pressure from some Democrats for further federal spending cuts, and in the progress of proposals for a line-item budget veto and new lobbying rules.

“The whole congressional debate for six weeks has been centered on whether to cut more and spend less,” said Rep. Peter Deutsch (D-Fla.). “And the Perot phenomenon has shaped that.”

Indeed, thinking of the 19 million votes he won in November, everyone in Washington seems to be trying to turn Perot into an ally or to use him as a bludgeon against their adversaries.

Clinton called Perot personally to try to enlist his support for the White House economic plan and also dispatched one of his most distinguished emissaries, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen, to try to soften Perot’s criticism of Clinton’s economic plan.

The Republicans, meanwhile, have frequently cited Perot principles, trying to hang a tax-and-spend label on the Administration.

But Perot himself has not been so easy to win. Despite claims that he does not want to pick a fight with the President, he has been increasingly caustic in his remarks about Clinton’s program.

Perot said Thursday that he would not vote for the congressional budget resolution, a plan that he said would add $1 trillion to the federal debt. The economic program is a “cloud,” and “an artist’s sketch,” he said, too lacking in details to be meaningful.

He said he fears that the Administration will cut defense to put money in “a social program,” and he hit Clinton’s $16.3-billion economic stimulus program as a “political handout” filled with temporary public-works positions he called “bubble” jobs.

“We can’t promise people candy when they’ve got to have chemotherapy,” he said.