Three-Ring Political Circus

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Nothing holds as much potential for Bush as the string of debates beginning this Sunday. The unprecedented schedule -- four 90-minute debates crammed into a nine-day period -- is the result of an argument, oddly sympathetic to Bush, that the Clinton camp made in the final hours of negotiations between the two campaigns last week. Clinton's seconds wanted fewer, and immediate, debates in order to cement more quickly the public's general preference for the Arkansas Governor. Bush's team wanted to string the debates over a longer period of time to give the incumbent a better chance to jostle the electorate's dim view of his performance in office -- and allow for a last-minute Clinton error. But Clinton's team insisted that the embattled Bush could make his case more effectively in a highly concentrated manner. After initially balking at the argument, the Bush team finally agreed. "At first," said a Bush negotiator, % "we would have preferred to stretch it out. But the Clinton people said that any impact we would have would quickly peter out, and our team came to believe that might be true." Added a Clinton counterpart: "Doing the debates fast ended up being in both sides' interests for totally different reasons." Both camps split the difference on format, agreeing to one debate before a panel of journalists, another before journalists and a single moderator, and a third led by a moderator with questions taken from the audience. The vice presidential debate will have a single moderator.

The big mystery was why Perot was rejoining a contest that was likely to cost him tens of millions of dollars with no chance of victory. Part of the answer -- perhaps the whole answer -- was ego gratification. When he abruptly quit the race in July rather than face probing questions about his background, business dealings and family matters, his reputation nosedived. Perot received hundreds of little looking glasses in the mail from angry supporters who demanded that he "look himself in the mirror." The backlash shamed the proud Texan. "His worst nightmare was to go down in history as a quitter," said an ex-associate. "It was a burr under his saddle that he couldn't stand -- he had to get it under control."

Like some kind of political cryogenicist, Perot kept his campaign in suspended animation after July, spending $4 million in August to keep offices open and volunteers on board. Meanwhile, he published an economic plan -- composed largely by a team of graduate students -- that made it to the best-seller list, thanks partly to mass purchases by Perot's own field operatives. That plan, a drastic deficit-reducing blueprint, provided the foundation stone for Perot's subsequent claims that neither major candidate was addressing the issues.