Perot Prepares for Debate Test by Cracking the Books : Politics: Independent candidate is studying up but is not using speaking drills or surrogate opponents, aides say. His campaign reruns TV ad.

DALLAS — Ross Perot, who said he will spend 16 to 20 hours a day brushing up for Sunday’s presidential debate, is doing it without speaking drills or surrogate opponents, aides said Friday.

Asked by a TV producer if Perot would consent to a “photo-op” of his preparations, spokeswoman Sharon Holman said: “You’ve probably already got it in your file: Mr. Perot sitting at his desk.

“There are no stand-ins, there’s no studio. It’s Ross Perot being Ross Perot, and studying very hard,” she said.

Orson Swindle, chairman of Perot’s national campaign, said the independent candidate has “sort of been preparing all his life. . . . What you’re going to see is vintage Ross Perot--what you’ve been seeing for four months.”

Perot has already signaled his plans to concentrate on the issues and take no part in any “character assassination” if President Bush and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton carry their escalating feud into the studio.

If the other candidates aim their attacks at him, Perot will “probably just smile at them,” Swindle said.

Meanwhile, the Perot campaign Friday night again broadcast the 30-minute campaign commercial that it first aired Tuesday night.

The ad, shown on the ABC network, repeated the blunt diagnosis of America’s problems that has been the basis of Perot’s message since he announced Feb. 20 that he might run.

The ad presented Perot at a desk in front of an American flag, flipping through 28 charts that illustrate the rising debt and economic weakness that have afflicted the nation.

Unlike Bush and Clinton, who argue that unemployment has become the most dangerous threat to the nation, Perot contends the most serious problem is the debt that has mounted as interest charges and entitlement costs have outstripped tax revenues.

He denounced the leaders, including both the President and Congress, who he said have tried to sidestep the problem. “Nobody steps up to the plate and accepts responsibility for anything, including the $4-trillion debt that you and I must pay for,” Perot said.

While Perot blames both Democrats and Republicans, the Bush Administration seems to come in for the harder knocks. Perot outlined how the debt has accelerated during 12 years of a Republican stewardship of the White House, and mocks Bush’s 1980 campaign phrase, “voodoo economics.”

“To use the Washington term, we’re in deep voodoo, folks, right here,” Perot said. A little later, borrowing a phrase from the Democratic campaign playbook, he talked about how “we got into trickle-down economics and it didn’t trickle.”

Perot said “the core cause” of the problem are the officials who work in Washington, then cash in their careers later as they become highly paid agents of foreign governments.

“This is like a general switching armies in the middle of a war,” Perot said.

He notes how the Japanese are investing 16% of their gross domestic product, while in the United States, the figure is 4%. “We are thinking 10 minutes ahead. We have got to invest in the future, and we are not,” he said.

Perot also hinted at some of the politically explosive remedies for the problems: raising the gas tax 50 cents a gallon over five years and trimming entitlement programs.

In heavily taxing gasoline, he said, the Europeans and Japanese “take that money and invest it in the future.” And he noted that of the federal budget “the biggest single sum goes to entitlements; again, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, so on and so forth,” Perot said.

Perot also insisted again that he is not campaigning from any selfish desire to be President.

“You want to know why I’m willing to put my family through all of this?” he asked. “Not a single minute of this is pleasant. . . . But this has got to be done for these little children.”

Separately, at the Perot campaign’s daily news briefing Friday, an official of Perot’s computer services company faced questions about an ABC-TV report suggesting Perot’s companies have tried to avoid the costs of seriously ill employees, including an ex-Marine who died of AIDS in 1986.

David Bryant, general counsel of Perot Systems, declined comment on the network’s charge that Perot’s former company, Electronic Data Systems, had fired ex-Marine Bobby Joe King when it learned he had AIDS. King sued the company for wrongful discharge and reached an out-of-court settlement, according to the report that was broadcast Thursday.

Perot founded EDS and ran it until December, 1986, when he sold out to General Motors Corp.

Bryant said the episode was “six or seven years old,” and suggested that inquiries should be directed to EDS. “I just don’t know about that one,” he said.

But a spokesman for EDS, Anthony Good, suggested in turn that the questions should be asked of those who ran EDS at the time.

“This occurred under a different management,” Good said, adding that the firm’s 70,000 employees include “a couple of dozen” AIDS patients, “who are treated with the care and sensitivity shown anyone else.”

Bryant denied ABC’s further allegation that two Perot Systems supervisory officials had been fired because they had hired a woman whose disabled son’s medical bills threatened the company’s insurance plan.

He said the pair were “disgruntled former employees” who were fired for other reasons and were using the allegation to pressure Perot Systems into paying them “large amounts of money.”