STOP PEROT. Now.

Working professional politicians, well equipped to recognize megalomania when they see it, hate Perot’s guts, of course — almost all of them. His selfishness is undisciplined by actual administrative or representative responsibility. And he acts on it so freely, too, regularly subordinating the established procedures of American democracy to the demands of his own insatiable vanity. But still, they went to touch his garment: Approve us, Ross, approve us. And Perot repaid their deference, sort of, dispatching his henchmen to lecture “the volunteers” about the logistical and financial difficulties of creating a third party, and banishing those conventioneers who were determined to pursue the idea to an adjacent hotel.

Well, well, well. What a difference a few weeks and a Colin Powell book tour make. Perot’s star in the Third Way galaxy is suddenly eclipsed by the glow of a legitimate contender; he is (gasp!) off the front pages. And so the Unabomber of American politics goes back on Larry King this past Monday with a threat. To wit, reduced to its essence: Unless the Republican party manages to assume dictatorial power in Washington and ram through Perot’s incoherent, gruel-thin agenda by Christmas, he will blow up that party’s presidential campaign next year. There will be a third presidential aspirant in 1996, after all, his name on all 50 state ballots, the better to siphon a few million clinching “not-Clinton” votes away from the GOP.

Wanna get involved in the “Independence Party,” which will nominate its stooge candidate by “satellite hook-up” from “auditoriums all over the country” next April? Call Ross’s new 800 number. You’ll hear about “a new party” called, oops, the “Reform Party.” But don’t let the bad guys “bug you on minutiae,” says Mr. Perot. “They” — you know, they — “don’t want this to happen.” His party “will have a name, it will be a good name, don’t worry about that.”

Yes, but why? Perot is not the world’s best explainer, but the answer seems to go like this. Voters are dis- gusted with politics, a phenomenon reflected in those “high quality polls” he likes to read, the polls whose questions are rigged to generate but one correct response: Damn right, I’m disgusted. Addressing this disgust apparently involves one thing, mostly: a balanced budget amendment, which failed by one vote in the Senate earlier this year. You’d have thought another Republican victory next November would fix this problem quite nicely. It might also have occurred to you that Congress is about to enact a budget plan that redirects 60-plus years of federal social welfare policy, tearing it up root and branch, achieving fiscal balance by 2002 in the process. A history-making achievement, by ordinary standards.

But not good enough for Mr. Perot. He hasn’t yet released the full-scale platform he claims to have developed, but on Larry’s show last week a few highlights were revealed. A legally restricted four-month federal campaign season. Voting on weekends. Abolition of the electoral college. Guaranteed health and retirement benefits equivalent to those of government staffers. A total ban on lobbying expenditures. Congressional campaign fundraising restricted to each member’s home district. “And this and that and the other,” as Perot told King with his customary eloquence, “et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.”

Every one of these ideas is terrible, incidentally. But what’s truly striking is how small they are. This is the big, important agenda the Republican Congress is ignoring while it busies itself with tiny stuff, like undoing the New Deal? Please. Were congressional “inaction” truly the burr under Ross’s saddle, he would run “Independence Party” candidates in legislative races next year, attempting to elect his own “reform” congressmen and senators. And that’s the one thing he’s promised not to do. It’s to be an independent presidential campaign exclusively. For which you do not actually need a formal, third-party structure, as Perot himself proved so notably in 1992.

So never mind the man’s ostensible rationale. The truth is simple: This is about Perot, and the satisfaction of his infantile narcissism. Why is it that practically no one in official Washington will come right out and say so?

The newspapers are now full of speculation about the technical how-and- whether of third-party mobilization. Can Perot get the requisite 900,000 registered voter signatures — -or 90,000 new registrants — in California by October 24? He probably cannot legally finance his new party all by his billionaire lonesome, and he won’t get the $ 60 million in general campaign funds that the federal government grants to established major parties. Can he replace that sum with contributions from small donors nationwide? And who will be his patsy nominee? (Colin Powell says Perot has added “a little measure of possibility to the independent route,” a statement that by itself raises questions about the general’s seriousness of purpose where presidential politics is concerned.) Perot isn’t saying, except that, barring the reincarnation of Washington or Lincoln, the “Independence” candidate won’t be a current member of the Republican or Democratic party. And he won’t be “some weirdo,” either.

Thanks, pal. Democrats may be pardoned for coop- erating in this puerile media guessing game, their glee concealed behind a front of dispassionate analysis. But Republicans don’t have that luxury. Perot says he wants to ” restore trust and confidence in government,” something he deliberately undermines every time he opens his mouth. Heads up to the new majority party, now shaping the future of American public policy: Whenever Mr. Perot advances the great cause of his own notoriety by encouraging mass dissatisfaction with the post-1994 order, he’s encouraging mass dissatisfaction with you.

Completely unwarranted dissatisfaction, let’s remember. The Republican Congress was elected last November in a rare seismic shift of national political alignments. It is pursuing precisely the promised conservative agenda that produced that shift, against weakly articulated opposition, and with so far stunning success. True, some voters are holding ultimate judgment in abeyance, waiting for next year to see how things all turn out. But come on, there’s no focused mass disgust with the Republican party “out there.” Not yet, anyway. And there probably won’t be, either, unless Republicans fail to rebut Ross Perot’s loud claim that there should be.

That’s what this Independence party presidential campaign will mean: that the conservative Republican revolution is illegitimate. Republicans certainly can’t acquiesce in that verdict. Carried to its logical conclusion, Perot’s latest exercise of egotism could well seriously derail their revolution, now only six Senate seats and the Oval Office away from filibuster- and veto-proof fruition. It simply won’t do for Republican spokesmen to whimper like jilted schoolgirls at prom time about how Perot has betrayed them; of course he has, he’s Ross Perot. His challenge must be met directly, his balloon punctured for good. His argument about congressional ” failure,” in other words, must be demolished. Soon.

There’s precedent for that. Perot is clever, but he’s not that smart. He tends to dissolve into humiliated incoherence when knowledgeably contradicted face to face, as A1 Gore proved during the 1993 battle over NAFTA.

Here’s a suggestion. There is one Republican politician, an historian by training, who is uniquely qualified to explain why, in a non-parliamentary republic of separated powers, American politics tends naturally and valuably to divide itself into two parties, not three or more. And why those two parties are supposed to reflect each of two general tendencies in public opinion, conservatism and liberalism. And why and how the Republican party, at least, is doing its part of this job so well, in tune with the wishes of a large plurality of our voting citizens.

This Republican, as it happens, is also the one leading member of his party in Congress who has reacted swiftly and vehemently to Ross Perot’s latest folly, calling it “a substantial mistake,” and “a fantasy of delusion.” Good for Newt Gingrich.

How about a Gingrich-Perot debate on national television? Surely Larry King would be delighted to serve as host.

David Tell, for the Editors