E-mail From The Floor

Subject: Inside The Perot Party

Dick Lamm thinks he and a Republican, Ed Zschau, will make a "perfect" combo that could actually allow him to win the Reform Party nomination for president. Don't bet on it.

The race for the presidential nomination of the Perot Party looks to be over except for the shouting. And even the shouting might not be permitted for a while. Or, more precisely, not until the second part of the two-part Perot convention.

That's right, control freak Ross Perot has at least initially decreed that Part I of the Reform Party convention in Long Beach, Calif., on Aug. 11, will be a subdued affair, devoid of the kind of demonstrations Americans are used to seeing at political conventions. According to backers of Perot opponent Lamm, in fact, placards and signs might even be banned from the event scheduled the Long Beach Convention Center.

Russ Verney, the national coordinator of the Reform Party, told TIME he is designing the event in Long Beach for "decision-making" with the hope of having an "attentive audience" comprised only of people (no more than 1500) who have valid Reform Party ballots. The "enthusiastic part," he says, will be saved for a week later in Valley Forge, Pa., which will be mostly a rally open to the public that will celebrate the presidential nominee.

There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of suspense about who the nominee will be, however. Surprise, surprise, it looks like the candidate of Ross Perot's Reform Party will be...Ross Perot. In the balloting to determine who will be eligible to run for the nomination, Perot won in a landslide. He got 64.6 percent of the vote, more than twice the number of votes received by Lamm, who got 27.8 percent.

Impressive? Not really. What was most remarkable about the balloting was how few people voted. The Reform Party mailed 979,882 ballots to people around the country who had signed petitions to make the Reform Party eligible to run a presidential candidate in November. This number was 320,000 less than the 1.3 million who actually had signed those petitions. Worse, 99,584 of the ballots mailed were returned as undeliverable, meaning that the total number of petitions received was 880,298.

But here is the kicker: the total number of people who voted was a paltry 43,057, or 4.9 percent, of the ballots received. Verney has asserted that this number was a strong showing because responses to direct mail pieces usually run between one and three percent. But that's a weak argument. This is a self-selected group which is supposed to care about a reform party, not some random list. In other words, not even the people who went out of their way to support Perot and his party are all that eager to participate in the cause.

Lamm also is having second thoughts. In his interview with TIME, Lamm said the Reform Party "so far is a wholly owned subsidiary of Ross Perot." Lamm also refuses to answer when asked if he was scammed into entering the race. "Don't throw me into that briar patch," he replied. He does assert, however: "I do not think the Reform Party is as open and as level a playing field as promised." As a small, but symbolic example of the slights he has felt, Lamm has told reporters that he didn't receive one of the first ballots sent out by the Reform Party, so he was unable to vote for himself.

Tensions are running high between the Perot and Lamm camps. Lamm demanded (as a matter of public fairness) that the results of the Round One balloting be announced publicly, even though the Perot folks wanted to keep them secret. Lamm announced the tallies almost right after he got them by phone in Denver Monday evening. Perot's people waited until the next morning to release them and had believed that Lamm was going to wait as well.

What's more, Lamm really is Gov. Gloom, and more than a little weird. "America is like the drunk who's looking for his keys under the street light, even though he lost them down the block," Lamm told TIME. Referring to a proposal to lower the federal gas tax, he said: "Thomas Jefferson, Teddy Roosevelt, Eisenhower, they'd rise up from their graves and yell, 'Shame!'" He also said, "The United States is becoming dysfunctional; its problems are outrunning its solutions."

The Perot conventions will be held in modest-sized halls, with a capacity of 1500 to 200 people. The planners expect only local folks to show up. The real audience will be on television; both CNN and C-Span say they will cover the events. The Long Beach convention will last three hours. Many details haven't been worked out, but each candidate will be given up to an hour to speak and there will be a short film about the history of the Reform Party. The Valley Forge event will be only and hour and a half, and essentially only a rally.