Perot’s problem could be that he comes out of a line of truth is actually more common than it is in politics. “Politicians may be kiting checks or sleeping with their contributors’ wives, but they don’t lie nearly as much as businessmen,” says Washington publicist Frank Mankiewicz, who has known a lot of both. That’s partly because politicians are more accountable to the press, Congress and other institutions where lying can get you into trouble. Many businessmen–CEOs, for instance–face a similar accountability. They, too, are risk averse, which makes lying less likely to be part of their makeup.

But there’s one kind of business where lying is almost endemic. Kenneth Rind, who 125 million venture-capital firm, spends his days with entrepreneurs–the people who create jobs and build the country. “An entrepreneur who is not in trouble closes off no avenues, keeps a lot of balls in the air and will never tell you the full truth if a half-truth will suffice,” Rind says. “An entrepreneur who is in trouble will lie, cheat, steal, smuggle cocaine and ship bricks.”

Ross Perot can safely be assumed not to be a cocaine smuggler. But he is most certainly an entrepreneur by nature, a supersalesman for whom the beauty of the deal is more important than the accuracy of the words used to close it. The irony is that in order to keep his candidacy off the defensive he will have to soften his sales pitch, blunt his blunt denials and begin talking more like just another politician. A skilled politician would not have repeatedly denied the existence of a policy against beards (“goofy stuff; myths”) when the policy had been committed to paper and could easily leak, as it did last week.

What protects and enhances Perot–at least right now–is TV. In the talk-show format he favors, nailing a candidate for lying is next to impossible. Even if the anchors have the details of Perot’s record at their fingertips (which most don’t), they cannot bore in without seeming to hog air time from the audience. On the ABC News town meeting, for instance, Perot, denying much involvement in a Ft. Worth airport project, told Peter Jennings: “I never once came to Ft. Worth to lobby. Rest my case. Call the mayor tomorrow and check it out.” When ABC News called the mayor the next day to check it out, the mayor said that Perot (as well as his son) had indeed lobbied him in Ft. Worth. For months, NEWSWEEK and others have reported that Perot hadn’t been candid about his role in this project.

Of course, none of that came across on the show itself, where Perot seemed refreshingly blunt. That’s one of the paradoxes of television: appearing honest is more important on TV than actually being honest. Perot comes across as more truthful than George Bush and Bill Clinton, even though what he says may bear even less relation to the actual truth. The conventional politicians pay a price when they try not to lie.

That’s not to say Bush hasn’t told his share of whoppers. My personal favorite was when Bush said of Clarence Thomas that “the fact that he is black and a minority has nothing to do with this sense that he is the best qualified.” Clinton tends to slide around questions rather than lie flat-out, which is where the “slick” tag came from. When a caller asked Clinton last week on “Today” about Gennifer Flowers, he replied, “What she said was not the truth. I absolutely denied it.” This is probably technically accurate. What Flowers told the Star about them having a 12-year affair is disbelieved by people who know him. Of course that begs the question of whether they ever slept together. A less subtle version of this was Clinton’s exasperating claim, in response to the marijuana question, that he “didn’t break any state laws.” (The pot use was in England.)

In that case the legalistic truth was at least as offensive as a lie. If Perot adopted that approach, he’d be finished. So why not try what he claims to believe in: the real truth about his respectable, even inspiring, personal history, without all of the Texas-size exaggeration and bristling denials? It might just be the freshest sales pitch of all.