IT'S MY PARTY AND I'LL RUN IF I WANT TO

By NANCY GIBBS

About this time four years ago, Ross Perot was blowing up balloons and clearing the dance floor of American politics by polling, however briefly, ahead of wallflowers George Bush and Bill Clinton. By the time Perot had bowed out and waltzed back in and said some loopy things, he still was able to persuade 19% of the voters to embrace him. Four years later he is feeling even more festive. He has a real national party; the Reform Party he founded has managed so far to get on the presidential ballot in 23 states. He even has what amounts to a primary challenger in the person of former Colorado Governor and china breaker Richard Lamm, who by announcing last week that he would indeed seek the Reform Party's nomination, has given Perot a chance to win his first miniature election.

The issues that attracted Perot's voters all remain on the table. Both Lamm and Perot promise an aggressive agenda of deficit reduction, campaign reform and entitlement cuts, problems that worry the swing voters who will decide this race. And even more promising, neither Bill Clinton nor Bob Dole has shown any inclination to talk about such meaty issues. Clinton served up another course of dainty presidential tapas, like overhauling the nation's meat-inspection system and cracking down on truants. He looked almost visionary compared with Bob Dole, who couldn't make up his mind on what he really thought about banning assault weapons.

So how is it that with all this good news for Perot the prospects for him and his Reform Party seem to be growing dimmer? In a TIME/CNN poll last week, more than twice as many registered voters said Clinton and Dole have what it takes to be a good President compared with those who liked Perot. (Only 22% feel that way about the Texan now, down from 35% in May 1992.) In a three-way race, just 13% said they would vote for Perot, a slide from 19% last September. The major-party candidates seem to have concluded that the American public has sampled radical change in the past two elections and not much liked its taste. Nor, perhaps, do most Americans see the need to tinker with a strong economy. Things are going well in the country these days, according to 61% of those in the TIME/CNN poll, almost double the number who thought so in July 1992.

What if they gave a Reform Party and nobody came?

Lamm calls himself a controversial politician whose time is now, the right man to appeal to a public sick of platitudes. But his time may come and go before he knows it, given the hurdles he faces--financial, logistical--just to mount a third-party bid. He now has less than a week in which to woo at least 10% of the Reform Party's 1.3 million petition signers. If enough of them put his name on their draft ballots, he will be invited to speak at the party convention Aug. 11 in Long Beach, California. Then participants will vote by mail, phone or E-mail. Independent monitors whom Perot has hired but whom he will not name will tally the results, and the winner will be announced Aug. 18 in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

Last August, Perot was saying he would rather perform brain surgery on himself than run for the White House again. Perot's intimates encouraged Lamm to jump in, and Perot himself claimed to be looking for a new face, "George Washington II." But that was then, and by last week he was saying that of course if his people want him to run, he will run. For his part, Lamm was saying last month that he wouldn't run if Perot did, a reasonable position given the fact that Perot owns the casino, hired the dealers, set the stakes and keeps the books. But that too had changed by last week. "I really feel that I've been dealt with fairly," Lamm said after Perot announced his willingness to serve if called. "I've seen nothing tonight to change my mind. I don't think Ross Perot is going to steal this election."

In fact Perot may not need to. Though not all Reform Party members are Perotistas, he is much better known and still has a loyal following within the movement. The Perot bloc is actually two or three constituencies that he remarkably united for a while in 1992. There was a socially conservative, blue-collar, anti-NAFTA group, the same people who flirted with Buchanan earlier this year--and it's not clear that Lamm, a pro-choice free trader, would have much to offer them. Then there was a fiscally conservative but socially moderate group that responded to Perot's talk about serious deficit cutting.

The problem for Perot is that four years later, the ingredients have changed. This time around his supporters are poorer and a little less Republican than the Perot voters of 1992. Blue-collar voters are sticking with him, but the white collars are fraying. Although at the moment Perot is drawing evenly from Clinton and Dole, Republicans are worried that in the end, Dole will be hurt more by having to split the anti-incumbent vote.

Though voters still rank the deficit, wage stagnation and the budget among their chief concerns, the popular hunger for reform may be shrinking. The public has had a bellyful of change, thanks in large part to Perot's goading in 1992. One of Clinton's first acts as President was to abandon his own promise to cut middle-class taxes so he could embrace the core of the Perot agenda. His first major legislative success was the big deficit-reduction package of 1993. That was almost pure Perot-- and it was enacted into law.

Next came the election of a Republican Congress promising a Contract with America drawn largely from Perot's playbook. The G.O.P.'S attempts to overhaul Medicaid and Medicare and balance the budget made it harder for people to imagine that spending cuts would spare the spending that they happen to favor. The public rejection of the G.O.P. revolution inspired Clinton's Lite Brigades. He still supports welfare reform--so long as no one gets hurt--and a balanced budget--so long as no popular programs get cut too much: a strategy that has left him with approval ratings roughly twice as high as either Gingrich's or Perot's.

Finally, many of those who still long for real reform through a third party would like to see someone other than Perot deliver it; he had his chance, and his liabilities are legion. But the most potent potential leader, Colin Powell, declined to answer the call. Without a charismatic leader like Powell, many independent-minded voters may now be thinking, Why bother?

Unto this breach rides Dick Lamm, who admits that his is as much a crusade as a campaign. "This is almost like Cinderella," he says. "You wander into the wrong place, and you lose your shoe, and all of a sudden, you're a presidential candidate." He may not be a Powell, but Lamm does have some advantages over Perot, mainly being a fresher face with proven electability and governing experience, more campaign mileage and a subtle sense of humor. "Ross Perot, to his credit, has built a party bigger than himself," Lamm deadpans. "That's what he intended to do."

The son of prosperous Republican coal-mine owners, Lamm worked his way through the University of Wisconsin-Madison, even though he didn't have to, spending summers as a lumberjack in Oregon and an ore-boat deckhand on the Great Lakes. He became a C.P.A. as well as a lawyer, graduating from law school at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1961, and eventually rose through the ranks of Colorado politics. As a state legislator in the 1960s, he pushed through one of the earliest pre-Roe v. Wade laws that permitted abortion in certain circumstances, which later became a national model. In the early 1970s, he caught the swells of an awakening environmental movement and kept the 1976 Winter Olympics out of Colorado. In 1974, in his successful bid for the governorship, he walked across the state, becoming one of the first politicians to adopt that strategy, and gave substance to grass-roots politics. Stymied by a Republican legislature, he wound up spending much of his time blocking urban sprawl, and in his third term, he warned about the dangers of runaway deficits and entitlement spending with such Wagnerian brio that he came to be known as Governor Gloom.

After leaving office, Lamm abandoned politics to teach and write, returning to the stage for a brief and ignominious Senate race in 1992, in which he lost in the primary to Ben Nighthorse Campbell. Since then he has been a prophet with marginal honor in his own land, lecturing earnestly about the shame he feels at being part of the first generation that will not pay its own way. "We've got to stop bullshitting the public," he told TIME. "The economy of the '90s can't support the dreams of the '60s."

It's not stretching to say that there is a little bit of Ross Perot in Dick Lamm: arrogance, elitism, a close personal identification with Paul Revere. The Coloradan can be "aloof and unforgiving," concedes brother Tom, a lawyer in Boulder, Colorado. "He is driven by ideas, not what others think of him." For at least this brief moment, Lamm has claimed the spotlight. But he will soon be competing not just with Perot but also with the Olympics and then the major-party conventions for airtime and oxygen. And when voters do take a look, just about everyone will find something to be offended by. Old folks will be reminded of his remark about their "duty to die"; veterans will learn that he wants to phase out some of their hospitals; immigrants that he wants to close the borders and slice legal immigration at least in half. Diane Dillingham, a longtime G.O.P. activist but Lamm admirer in Denver, thinks his suck-a-lemon style won't have much appeal. "The average voter doesn't want to hear the truth," she says. "If you don't sugar-coat it, you don't get elected." The solutions Lamm is currently proposing in his "No BS agenda" are viewed by his fans as both essential and impolitic. He wants to raise the age at which retirees can qualify for civil service pensions and cut cost of living adjustments for Social Security recipients; require wealthier people to pay more for their Medicare benefits; quit subsidizing rich retirees; cut military pensions, farm subsidies and price supports. And, he admits, "it will be politically traumatic." He guesses there may be a plurality of voters--maybe 40%--who are prepared to take him seriously. In the TIME/CNN poll, that number is just about exactly the size of support for such propositions.

Last time out, Perot hurt Bush more than he hurt Clinton; 43% of Perot voters were independents, 31% were Republicans and 26% were Democrats. Lamm, on the other hand, having been a Democratic Governor and as a pro-choice environmentalist, may well hurt Clinton more--a point made by Lamm's wife Dottie, a devout Democrat and a friend of Hillary's who warned her husband that she doesn't want a Dole victory on her conscience. Formerly a Clinton supporter, Lamm himself has repeatedly blasted the President for breaking faith. "You choose to pander to America's special interests," he wrote in an editorial. "You are thinking more about your re-election than Chelsea's future."

But as long as Clinton's diet-substance strategy is working so well, he's not likely to hustle to appropriate Lamm's message, unless anyone seems to be buying it. And selling it may take more time than Lamm has. In June he spoke to rave reviews at California's Reform Party state convention. "It was one of those magic first dates," he says, "where pretty soon you are holding hands. We really clicked." So a Democratic pollster asked state voters whom they would favor in a four-way contest: Clinton, Dole, Ralph Nader (from the Green Party) or Lamm. Lamm finished dead last, a hair under 1%.

--Reported by Laurence I. Barrett/ Bloomington, Jeffrey H. Birnbaum/Washington and Richard Woodbury/Denver

With reporting by LAURENCE I. BARRETT/ BLOOMINGTON, JEFFREY H. BIRNBAUM/WASHINGTON AND RICHARD WOODBURY/DENVER