Three-Ring Circus

YOU KNEW SOMETHING HAD TO give when George Bush started arguing with a 6- ft.chicken. For nearly a month, the President's men had been stiff-arming the dates and format proposed by a bipartisan debate commission and endorsed by Bill Clinton. The challenger was scoring political points by declaring that his opponent was afraid to face him man-to-man. Bush's charges of tax-and- spend liberalism, like his aggressive attacks on Clinton's draft record, were unable to dent the Democrat's double-digit lead in the polls. But when the Clinton forces began infiltrating Bush rallies with workers dressed in yellow-feathered chicken costumes and armed with signs reading WHY WON'T CHICKEN GEORGE DEBATE?, the President lost his cool.

"You talking about the draft-record chicken or are you talking about the chicken in the Arkansas River?" Bush asked one plumed heckler last week. "Which one are you talking about? Which one? Get out of here. Maybe it's the draft? Is that what's bothering you?"

The bird's answer is unrecorded. But on Thursday, the man who had been / written off as "the yellow Ross of Texas" -- billionaire businessman Ross Perot -- ruffled a few feathers of his own by dramatically re-entering the race he quit on July 16. The next day, the logjam over debates burst as negotiators for the Bush and Clinton camps announced that three presidential face-offs and one vice-presidential meeting would take place between Sunday, Oct. 11, and Monday, Oct. 19.

A lightning bolt of uncertainty had crashed into a campaign that was shaping up as a likely Democratic blowout. Suddenly, the battle between a flagging incumbent and his brash young challenger was transformed into a weird tag-team contest in which the newcomer might join forces with one man against the other -- or beat up on both of them simultaneously. And the complicated debate calculus that had been at the center of weeks of negotiations was skewed by the prospect of an unprecedented three-way debate.

No one expects Perot to win the election -- a CNN/Gallup poll taken the day before his re-entry gave the Texan only 7%, against 35% for Bush and 52% for Clinton -- but he has the potential to swing some key states into one column or the other and thus influence the electoral vote tally. Given Clinton's commanding lead, it is possible that Perot's reappearance act will have no effect on the outcome. But it offered the Republicans an unexpected break and a chance to beat the odds. "The race wasn't going anywhere for us," said a Bush campaign official. "Now we have a window of opportunity to change their minds. It is not a guarantee, but it is at least an opening for us."