Behold the unharnessed desire that is H. Ross Perot: “Get me the fucking list!” he shrieked at longtime sidekick Tom Luce during a television shoot four years ago, as the poor man fumbled for some now-forgotten piece of paper. “Don’t you understand? When I say I want something, I want it!” All of it. And all at once.
What Perot desperately sought in 1992, of course, was mass acknowledgment of his previously undetected significance in American public life — significance at a level generally accorded only to major contenders for the presidency. A bizarre conceit: On paper, at least, Perot may have been the least qualified presidential candidate in history. But as that year’s events made clear, perotismo observes no ordinary rules: If Ross wants something badly enough, Ross needn’t “deserve” it, and only an outright conspiracy can frustrate his designs.
Never before had the nation’s political stage been hijacked this way for the performance of one man’s private psychodrama. Today, four years later, that man is back. We may well be subjected to the same vulgar spectacle a second time.
Shadowy secret agents determined the outcome in 1992, Perot now announces on Larry King Live, always his favored venue for displays of full-frontal egomania. “Democrats were begging me to get out of the race” toward the end, he reveals. And people “at the very top of the Republican party” — the same ones who had earlier plotted against his daughter’s wedding, perhaps? — ” were begging me to stay in.” Had voters not been confused by such webs of intrigue, had they been allowed to vote their “consciences,” Perot insists, he would have won the race going away. The exit polls prove it.
Dark forces are again arrayed against him in 1996, he warns. “Dirty tricks” artists whisper that Perot’s new Reform party cannot play more than a spoiler’s role in this year’s campaign and thus serves only its founder’s vanity. This charge he heatedly denies. The party belongs to its members, he says. They are ordinary men and women repelled by special-interest-induced gridlock in Washington. The organized pressure of their fall endorsements will force the next Congress finally to approve legislation necessary to save the nation from certain collapse. And their 1996 presidential candidate will not be a spoiler — and may even be someone other than Perot. This “is not about me, Larry,” he demurs. “It is about our country.”
Not really. There has never been “spontaneous” grassroots support for anything associated with Ross Perot. He is now, personally, the biggest single “special interest” in the country — having already spent more than $ 75 million since 1992 to advance his “cause” in national politics, and ready with another $ 60-plus million for the rest of this year. But for this booty, the new Reform party would not, of course, exist.
The current Perot “platform” is a pathetic joke, a one-page chart of sentence-fragment “principles” that would embarrass the average student- government candidate in a suburban high school. Gone are Ross’s Bush-era diagrams and graphs. Nowadays he mostly just gripes that the Republican Congress hasn’t somehow magically passed its Contract items over presidential vetoes (without, it must be said, any help from Ross at all). And though Perot routinely claims that it was his followers” votes that tipped the scales in 1994 and actually produced a GOP Congress, little evidence exists to back him up. His endorsement is a feeble weapon — and maybe even a boomerang. In his own home state of Texas, former governor Ann Richards is proof of that.
So what, then, is the Reform party about? Its nominating convention won’t take place until Labor Day, too late for the “winning” presidential candidate to attract suffcient contributions from workaday small donors. That candidate can only be a self-financing wealthy person, in other words. One who might just conveniently escape, in the five months between now and September, the kind of press scrutiny a formally declared candidate could otherwise expect. Whose particular interests does such a process protect? One guess is all you need.
Offcial Washington, staring habitually at its statistical navel, now pores over polling “cross-tabs” in an effort to determine how Ross Perot’s apparently inevitable candidacy will affect the outcome of this year’s presidential campaign. His support seems capped at around 15 percent in most voter surveys and increasingly comprises people in the demographic groups least likely to turn out on election day. From whose hide will this small bloc of voters come? Whom will Perot hurt more: Clinton or Dole? The most ” sophisticated” such analysis, by Democratic pollster Peter Hart, says Perot strengthens Dole and weakens the president. Sixty percent of Perot’s current poll support is “new,” derived from respondents who say they did not vote for him in 1992. And among these freshly minted Perotistas, opinion breaks six-to- one for Clinton over Dole in a two-man field.
It’s a clever and interesting numbers crunch. But it strikes most Democratic and Republican strategists as counterintuitive. A presidential reelection campaign is almost always a referendum on the incumbent, they reason. A three-way campaign this year will split the anti-Clinton vote. If Perot gets a respectable number of votes, the president wins.
That’s probably the right conclusion. But it’s right for a different, deeper reason — one having less to do with Perot’s prospective draw from either major party and more to do with a Perot candidacy’s almost psychological effect on the fall campaign.
American politics is now divided between a Republican party that succeeds by appeal to its more popular ideas and a Democratic party that succeeds largely by minimizing the importance of its less popular ideas and concentrating instead on the personal appeal of its candidates. Bob Dole may yet win an ideological campaign this year. Bill Clinton will win a campaign of personalities.
And here, Perot’s daily, unavoidable presence in the campaign may prove the clincher. Perot stands for nothing. He will spend the campaign advancing the poisonously dishonest contention that both his competitors — each a reasonably serious man leading a reasonably serious national political coalition — are also empty vessels. That American politics is so much “show business,” in short, its choices mere popularity contests. To the extent Perot succeeds in this cynical ploy, the quality and standards of American political discourse will be debased.
Can the Democratic and Republican parties do the right thing and refuse to permit this man, now serving almost exclusively as a totem for the chronically disgruntled, an honored third place in the coming fall debates? That’s probably expecting too much. By encouraging a personality-focused campaign, Perotism advances the Democratic party’s narrow, short-term interests. And were Dole to insist on excluding Perot from his debates with Clinton — a perfectly reasonable position, on the merits — he might open himself to unwelcome charges of ducking.
But the print and broadcast media need not even remotely entertain such partisan calculations. And if they do their jobs correctly, we may still be spared another degraded campaign. Perot cannot yet be entirely ignored; he is still “news.” But he deserves a level of penetrating scrutiny he has still not quite received this year — scrutiny that anyone else in his position would automatically and immediately receive, scrutiny of the sort that ran him straight out of the race, at least temporarily, in 1992. Ross Perot is now, bogus denials to the contrary notwithstanding, a full-fledged, richly funded candidate for the presidency of the United States.
Should he refuse to answer pointed press inquiries in the next few weeks, Perot will prove himself to be, at this point in his tawdry political career, little more than Harold Stassen with three billion dollars: a sure loser, despite all the cash. In which case he will no longer deserve any press attention for the remainder of the year. Harold Stassen, after all, would never be invited to appear on Larry King.
David Tell, for the Editors
