CLINTON-BUSH-PEROT MAKE FOR INTERESTING HANDICAPPING

Bill Clinton has probably done as well as he could in selecting as his vice presidential running mate Tennessee Sen. Al Gore. Will that choice make any difference in the electoral map American voters write on November 3? It's doubtful.

At stake here is more than the brutal wisdom embodied in Richard Nixon's old dictum that a presidential nominee cannot help himself with his choice for the Number 2 slot; "he can only hurt." That dictum is undoubtedly true.

What Clinton faces are some truly daunting facts on the electoral landscape. Consider:

Since Harry Truman's stunning upset win in 1948, Democratic presidential nominees have won a majority of the white male vote exactly once: the 1964 landslide of Lyndon Baines Johnson. Observers of an alleged "gender gap" take note: the real "gender gap" is not in a lack of women support for GOP candidates, but in the enormous lead Republicans have enjoyed among male voters.

The last Democrat to win the White House was a southern populist moderate, whose 1976 campaign squeaked by Gerald Ford, an unelected caretaker at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. But after four years, Jimmy Carter was tossed out of the White House, 44 states to six, in the first of three straight GOP landslides.

In '84, Ronald Reagan thrashed Carter's vice president, winning 49 states, and in 1988, something truly remarkable happened. A sitting vice president won the White House for the first time since Martin Van Buren took over from Andrew Jackson in 1836.

A non-partisan research group called the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate says voter turnout in Democratic primaries this year suffered an ominous 16 percent decline from 1988. The non-partisan group attributed the sharp decline to "dismay over the choice of candidates". This year's turnout sank to a record low for Democratic presidential primaries, despite an increase of five in the net number of primaries and six million more people in the voting age population.

This is the first presidential election in which a majority of the electorate will be residents of suburbs. The "baby-boomer" Clinton-Gore ticket the Democrats have assembled is calculated to appeal to suburbanites with a message (we are told by assorted gurus) of "generational change." Maybe.

In the view of this writer, Bill Clinton is a fatally flawed candidate, whose internal contradictions and manifest character flaws are bound to come to grief for his party. But on the bright side for the Democrats is ... George Bush. Two and one-half years after abandoning the impregnable fortress of Reaganism, while it was still winning converts, George Bush presides over a sluggish economy, the weakest President to be renominated since Herbert Hoover in 1932.

Then there's Ross Perot, who probably peaked three weeks ago, but who will continue to make things interesting in this most unusual of election years. It probably won't happen, but this one could end up in the House of Representatives, a House that will almost certainly contain 130 or more new faces.

This one will be wild.