Perot Laughs Off White House ‘Silliness’

Billionaire Ross Perot on Friday laughed off a White House reference to him as a “monster,” saying it is more “silliness” from a Bush Administration that has been busy jousting with fictional television characters.

“Now, maybe they’re going through their Willie Horton phase again,” Perot said in a television interview. “I don’t know what’s happening, but anyhow . . . it’s fun. It has nothing to do with reality.”

He also shrugged off similar remarks from House Minority Leader Robert H. Michel (R-Ill.) and did not conceal his glee at the consternation his apparent popularity is causing among top Republican officials.

“These people are just kind of in lock-step going nuts right now. They can’t figure out what to do,” he said in an interview on the ABC-TV program “Good Morning America.”

Perot’s reference in the television interview to Willie Horton reached back to the 1988 presidential campaign. Bush supporters used the example of Horton, a convicted murderer who had been furloughed by the state of Massachusetts, as a hammer against Democratic presidential candidate Michael S. Dukakis to portray the former Massachusetts governor as weak on crime issues.

On Friday, The Times reported that White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater warned that a vote for Perot would be supporting “a pig in the poke and a dangerous and destructive personality.”

Fitzwater said Perot’s refusal to present positions on major issues makes it difficult for the Republican and Democratic presidential campaigns to criticize him. But Fitzwater said that “being afraid of the unknown may soon make people ask, ‘What kind of monster are we buying here?’ ”

To which Perot responded on Friday: “You sure they didn’t say ‘cookie monster’?”

“Well, here’s the interesting phenomena here,” Perot said. “This is a race for the most important job in the country, one of the most important jobs in the world, and isn’t it fascinating that one day ‘Murphy Brown,’ a fictional television series, is the issue and the next day, the man who speaks for the President of the United States is using terms like monster?”

Earlier in the week, Vice President Dan Quayle stirred up a political brouhaha when he said the sort of immorality exemplified by the plot of the television sitcom “Murphy Brown,” in which Brown has a child out of wedlock, was one of the problems behind the Los Angeles riots.

Elsewhere, Perot’s representatives filed statements with the Federal Election Commission showing he contributed $850,000 to his grass-roots effort in April, bringing his personal contributions to $1.26 million so far.

The money is funding a petition drive to place his name on the ballot in all 50 states. On Friday, Kentucky and Wyoming became the fifth and sixth states to reserve a place on the ballot for Perot, the Associated Press reported.

In addition to Perot’s personal contributions, his petition organization reported contributions of $168,000, most of them in in-kind donations from volunteers and field organizers.

Although he has not declared his intentions, Perot is required to report the expenditures under federal election laws.

Contributions to Perot were tiny compared with the $12 million raised by President Bush this year for the Republican presidential nomination, and the $8.5 million Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas has collected in the race for the Democratic nomination.

Once the general election campaign gets under way, if Bush and Clinton accept federal financing for their campaigns, as expected, they would receive $55 million each in public funds. They would not be allowed to spend any of their own money, or any privately raised contributions, on their campaigns, although unaffiliated committees would be allowed to mount independent efforts to support the candidates.

The financial documents show the Perot Petition Committee with debts and other obligations of $622,701.50, much of it for equipment leases and telephone deposits.

Times staff writer Sara Fritz contributed to this story.