Politics 1-800-Pound Guerrillas

(4 of 4)

Unburdened by an excess of specifics, Brown can dance away from criticism with a disarming and alarming hey-it's-only-politics admission of error. Challenged last week on his support for the Bush Administration's controversial ban on fetal-tissue research, Brown displayed a sound-bite-deep understanding of the issue. Asked for the basis of his position, he confessed, "Well, you get asked these questions and you have to answer real quick." In his meeting with TIME editors last week, Brown dodged and wove through an imprecise discourse on energy, the economy and global competition before adding with implacable logic, "I have pilot-tested most of the political programs. I know which ones work and which don't." That remark harks back to Brown's hidden strength -- he has been there, through eight years as California Governor and two prior presidential campaigns. His governing style was not too much different from his current posture as a candidate: innovative, intense, intuitive and sometimes incoherent. A Brown win in next week's New York primary would halt Clinton's march to the nomination and trigger a frenzied effort by party regulars to find, somehow, another candidate.

Despite the two men's different backgrounds, there are odd affinities between Brown and Perot. Both live outside the normal realities of campaign finance: Brown because he can live on so little, and Perot because he has so much. They are both influenced by the same political guru, Pat Caddell, the former Democrat wunderkind who has been shunned by frontline presidential candidates since he advised Joseph Biden in 1987. Caddell sounds almost as if he is reciting Perot's script when he declares, "The thunder coming out of Texas is the thunder not of a third party but ((of)) an alternative to business-as-usual Washington politics."

But America, despite the current ferment and frustration, remains bound to a two-party system. A fall campaign between Bush and, presumably, Clinton may not send the adrenaline racing, but it will not have to degenerate into a lowest-common-denominator sound-bite sweepstakes. The appeal of Brown and Perot -- and Tsongas and, yes, even Buchanan earlier -- is a reminder that large groups of voters in both parties, along with the disaffected at home, long for something more than they are being offered. If mainstream political leaders cannot speak to the nation's restless uncertainty about the future, then both parties have no one to blame but themselves if they face a full- scale voter rebellion.

FOOTNOTE: *Up from the 6,000 calls Perot claims he received only 13 days earlier. If that rate of increase continues, by April 20 Perot will have been phoned by every man, woman and child in the U.S. -- 13 times.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: [TMFONT 1 d #666666 d {Source: Voter Research & Surveys, Connecticut Primary exit-poll results}]CAPTION: HOW BROWN WON CONNECTICUT