We need Perot," Jesse Hubbard says plaintively, "because he can beat the Establishment. He has the money to beat the Establishment."

Hubbard founded the statewide Perot petition drive in Kansas last spring. Now, the 46-year-old Dillard's department store employee from Paola County has dropped out of the movement's state leadership, but still backs Ross Perot.

For Hubbard, like so many other Perot supporters, the main issue is the deficit, but a vote for Perot will touch a deeper, more personal concern.

"I went to the debate in St. Louis," Hubbard recalls. "Someone asked me, 'Who are you?' I said, 'I'm Jesse Hubbard. I'm here for my man.'...They were all these high-up mucky-mucks. I'm a nobody. They couldn't believe that someone would let me get in there. They didn't care about the debate. It was just a status-symbol thing," he says.

Hubbard rails against both parties, but reserves particular venom for Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, the Democratic nominee and likely victor today. "Whenever I see [Clinton], I get a queasy feeling in my stomach," he seethes. "He's so slick. He just tells people what they want to hear."

Hubbard's reasons for backing Perot stand in sharp contrast to those of many other Perot proponents. Take Rusty Korman. Korman, 40, earns more than $125,000 a year in a jewelry business in Austin, Texas.

He says he was "real idealistic" in college, when he supported Sen. George S. McGovern, as Clinton did. He still considers himself a liberal but thinks Clinton won't do enough to stem the "orgy of consumerism" he thinks has led America to its economic and moral troubles.

Last spring, Hubbard and Korman were among those Perot bedeviled to form an old collection of supporters--those for and against abortion rights, members of both parties, people from all regions and backgrounds.

But Perot's army is perhaps not as unusual as his behavior this election year. Perot flirted with formally entering the race for months, appearing on television talk shows spinning cracker barrel wisdom about "our nation," "our children," "our problems." He abruptly left the race on the day Bill Clinton accepted his party's nomination, leaving many to think Perot tacitly endorsed what he then called "the revitalized Democratic Party."

Then he entered the race last month, just in time for the debates--and just in time to charge the Republicans with bizarre conspiracies to discredit him and his family.

But even after Perot's mercurial conduct, he is poised to garner the votes of perhaps 21 million Americans today, if last week's polls prove correct. Still, that may be one of the smallest ironies in a movement full of them.

Indeed, it is these ironies that seem clearest as the Texas entrepreneur's quixotic bid for the White House ends--for better or worse. Ironies that run thicker than Perot's twangy Texas accent, thicker than the tumbleweeds that drift outside his hometown of Texarkana, Texas.

In incarnations that contain varying degrees of truth, Perot is both a folksy speaker and a spinner of international conspiracy theories. He is both a computer entrepreneur and a Bubba-like rebel. He is both a Texarkana boy delivering newspapers on a bicycle and a dashing rescuer of two employees from the depths of revolutionary Teheran. Most visibly, he is both a billionaire and a populist.

And it is these ironies which, in the last week of the campaign, most clearly wedged Perot supporters from Perot detractors.

I don't think there's a populist bone in his body," says Alan Brinkley, a Columbia history professor and author of Voices of Protest, a study of Louisiana Sen. Huey P. Long and Father Charles Coughlin, two early-century populists.