Candidates Try to Catch Ride on Wave of Change : Politics: The call for reform is this year’s key issue, but meeting voter expectations may be a tricky task.

In a year of sudden reversals and political hairpin turns--when the improbable is no longer extraordinary--the one constant has been the voters’ overwhelming hunger for a fundamental change in the nation’s course.

Over the past year, that current has been strong enough to carry forward presidential candidates who might have been viewed as eccentric under more placid circumstances: conservative columnist Patrick J. Buchanan, former California Gov. Edmund G. (Jerry) Brown Jr., former Massachusetts Sen. Paul E. Tsongas and Ross Perot.

And now, in the campaign’s final days, that discontent remains the election’s driving force--one so powerful that it is likely to shape the presidency of whoever wins next Tuesday. “The 1988 election was about tinkering,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “This is about profound and fundamental change.”

As they race to the wire, all three presidential contenders are jostling to ride that wave. Each man is portraying himself as a reformer--and trying to paint his opponents as defenders of the status quo.

In the process, they have established high expectations for reform in both the political process and the government’s operation that will pressure whoever takes office next January. “They are all responding to a palpable disgust in the electorate with politics as usual in Washington,” said Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute. “So they will be under pressure to do something dramatic if elected.”

If there is a common thread to the turbulent politics of 1992, “it is the desire to start over,” said James P. Pinkerton, counselor to President Bush’s reelection campaign. “The feeling that we can do better, that the world does not consist of what power brokers in Washington can agree to in a smoke-filled room.”

That impulse has produced political upheavals that confounded the experts all year. During the primaries, Brown, Tsongas and Buchanan all ran much better than expected with an anti-politician persona and a call for dramatic reversals in policy.

That same desire for reform is powering the term-limit movement--which has placed initiatives to limit state and congressional terms on the ballot in 14 states. Polls in all those states show the initiatives leading, typically by margins of 3 to 1, said Kristine Kirby, communications director of Americans To Limit Congressional Terms.

Responding to that public sentiment, roughly three dozen U.S. senators and representatives have signed the group’s pledge to support limits on their own terms, which may require a constitutional amendment. So have over 170 House and Senate candidates, primarily, but not exclusively, Republicans. Meanwhile, 15 House members, nine Senate challengers, and almost 70 House challengers have signed the grass-roots “Lead or Leave” organization’s pledge that they will cut the deficit in half by 1996 or not seek reelection.

Nothing, though, has demonstrated the depth of the voters’ dissatisfaction more than their lasting interest in Perot. An improbable candidate from the outset--a populist billionaire with no record in public office and a mercurial temperament marked by a penchant for conspiracy theories--Perot shot into contention in the presidential polls this spring by promising to “look under the hood” in Washington and find new solutions unencumbered by partisan or ideological bickering.

Even more telling has been Perot’s success at reviving his bid this fall after he stunned his supporters by suddenly quitting the race last July. With his efforts seemingly moribund, Perot electrified his campaign during the presidential debates by re-establishing his identity as an outsider committed to shaking up Washington. In the debates, in his ads and in his interviews this week, he has cast a wide net over both his opponents as tools of the status quo; in Denver on Wednesday, he labeled them “two candidates that were funded and paid for by . . . foreign lobbyists and special interests.”

Perot has run into new problems with his unsubstantiated accusations that White House dirty tricks prompted his departure from the race last summer. But, like Tsongas and Brown before him, Perot has “set a standard of outsider honesty and fundamental change,” that both of the other candidates have to meet, said Stanley B. Greenberg, Bill Clinton’s pollster.

Indeed, since Perot’s revival, both Clinton and Bush have turned the volume back up on reform messages that both had muted.

When he declared his candidacy last fall, Clinton came out of the blocks offering a platform of fundamental reform within his own party and the government. Casting himself as an outsider from Washington, Clinton criticized Congress, promised to “reinvent government” by streamlining bureaucracy and said he would restructure social policy to demand “personal responsibility” from the recipients of government aid.

During much of the fall, though, Clinton has sublimated that message to a single-minded critique of Bush’s economic record; during the three presidential debates, Clinton’s calls for reform disappeared almost entirely.

Now, in the final hours, Clinton is struggling to retake the reform ground that Perot has occupied. In his speeches, he declares himself the only candidate who “has never been part of the Washington insider Establishment”--a veiled reference to Perot’s lobbying activities and ties to presidents from Richard M. Nixon to Ronald Reagan. And Clinton is once again trying hard to convince audiences that he has produced “a new Democratic Party” committed to campaign finance and lobbying reform and a recognition “that government cannot solve all our problems.”

First in Denver, and again Friday in Nashville, Bush made his most determined effort in weeks to identify with the reform urge. The President told his audiences that he was committed to “a conservative activist government” that would shake up the schools, the health care system and the legal system through market-based reforms that “give individuals, businesses and families the means to make their own choices through competition and economic opportunity.”

Those ideas, Bush argued, offered more fundamental change than Clinton’s agenda. Compared to the Administration’s plan to promote competition by providing parents vouchers to send their children to private school, Clinton’s educational reform ideas amount to “tinkering around the margins,” the President declared.

Each candidate has imperfect credibility as a reformer. Most of the ideas Bush now trumpets occupied little of his energy over the past four years. Clinton’s call for shaking up Washington rings hollow to some who recall his close relations with powerful interests in Arkansas. And Perot’s temperament leads some to wonder whether he could stay the course long enough to pound reforms in campaign financing and the budget process through a reluctant Congress.

But, Marshall and others believe, the substantial influx of new representatives to Congress next year--over 100 new members are expected--will provide a powerful momentum for both political reform and new directions on domestic policy.

And, despite their differences, there is substantial overlap between all three contenders on such issues as reviving the inner cities--a confluence that reflects a broader intellectual consensus among younger policy analysts on the left and the right.

Together these intellectual and political currents may be strong enough that the next President will have no choice but to respond to them.

“Whoever gets elected President next is going to do a lot more domestic reform than they ever expected,” Pinkerton predicted.