by Scott Farris
For Perot and these other celebrity candidates, their great wealth was perceived by many as a virtue. Because of the 1976 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Buckley v. Valeo, no limits are placed on personal campaign spending. This allowed Perot and the other super-rich to self-fund their campaigns, which supporters found appealing because their candidates then owed no favors to special interests as an exchange for needed campaign contributions. Not lost on their admirers was how this wealth also freed the supporters from a good deal of hard work. Large sums of money could immediately put in place the type of political infrastructure it would take a true grassroots movement years to develop.
Lack of prior experience in elected office was perceived as an equal or greater virtue than wealth. “Thank God he has no political experience!” one supporter told a pollster, as Perot had never run for any elected office before running for president. Perot, his supporters believed, could enter public office with “clean hands” and no prior commitment to a course of action based on party loyalty or a particular ideological bent. Perot ran as a political independent, but even the rich and famous who have run as Republicans or Democrats have joined Perot in offering the promise, implicit or explicit, that they were not typical partisan politicians, but rather offered the opportunity to move “past partisanship, past bipartisanship to postpartisanship,” as Schwarzenegger phrased it in his second inaugural address as governor.
Perot’s campaign, according to one political scientist, was not merely against partisan politics but against the very “idea of partisanship, and indeed, against the idea that politics is a profession.” While experience is considered a plus in almost any other profession, Perot argued that too much experience in politics is corrupting, with the United States being ruled by a “political class” that is “out of touch” with most American voters. He amplified this message with one of his key proposals: term limits for all elected offices. The belief that a career in politics neither offered nor required any particular accumulation of knowledge or development of talent resonated in a culture that one could argue is devoted to finding shortcuts to success—a society where most state governments operate lotteries promising instant wealth, where Las Vegas became the nation’s most popular tourist destination, and where television “infomercials” promised the opportunity to earn thousands if not millions from the privacy of your home—though by doing what, exactly, was never made clear.
In a culture of instant gratification, large segments of the population rejected the worldview that our problems and challenges were complicated and nuanced, and instead subscribed to the view that there were always simple, common-sense (perhaps even pain-free) answers whose implementation would be thwarted by a government composed of mandarins more concerned with their own status than the public welfare. If Perot offered few specific proposals on how to fix an economy perceived to be in recession in early 1992—beyond his pledge to “get under the hood” and see what needed to be “fixed”—it did not bother his admirers. They had no doubt that the man who had beaten IBM and GM at their own game would find solutions to the nation’s economic woes, answers beyond the grasp of the lawyers and lifelong politicians who had never met a payroll.
While Perot was vague on what he might do to stimulate economic growth, he had some specific proposals for the issue he made his own during his first presidential campaign, the federal budget deficits and the national debt. The budget deficit issue played into Perot’s strengths—and his and his audience’s prejudices. The deficit was prima facie evidence that traditional politicians were in over their heads when it came to finance, and the issue cried out for leadership from someone, like Perot, who knew how to make and manage money. Perot likened the deficit to “a crazy aunt you keep down in the basement. All the neighbors know she’s there, but nobody talks about her.” When Reagan took office in 1981, the national debt was just over nine hundred billion dollars. By 1992, the national debt had soared to four trillion dollars. Complicit in the failure to address the government’s deficit each year was a tax code that Perot compared to “an old inner tube that’s been patched by every special interest in the country.”
Perot argued his business skills would allow him to reduce federal spending through efficiencies without the need for dramatic cuts in government services. But, to his credit, he was not proposing pain-free deficit reduction. He advocated a fifty-cent-a-gallon tax on gasoline to reduce the deficit, plus higher income tax rates, higher tobacco taxes, and reduced exemptions for mortgages and business expenses. Washington insiders, Perot argued, because they were only interested in lining their own pockets at the expense of the national good, could never implement such common sense solutions. Implementing his common sense fiscal agenda would also require a political reform agenda that would include term limits for elected officials, campaign finance reform, and a ban on former officials lobbying for foreign governments.
The public response to Perot’s qualified announcement on Larry King’s program that he might run for president was electric, triggering an amazing groundswell of support. His office reported receiving an average of two thousand phone calls an hour from people who wanted to help. Almost overnight, volunteers organized in all fifty states to begin the process of getting Perot on the ballot. Reflecting the near religious fervor that ensued, one volunteer called Perot’s conditional promise to run his “covenant with America,” while another likened all the volunteers circulating ballot access petitions to “peaceful freedom fighters . . . who had come to take their country back.” What seemed to really thrill Perot supporters was the sense that he had empowered them to take charge of his campaign. One Perot volunteer recalled an interview in which Perot was asked, “‘What could be done to fix the country and the path on which it was headed?’ ‘Look in the mirror’ was his response. Indeed I did.”
The Perot volunteers had a formidable task ahead of them. Getting an independent candidate on the ballot in all fifty states is extraordinarily difficult, and once on the ballot independent and third party candidates face skepticism that they can actually win an election.
There is no national standard for ballot access. Each of the fifty states has its own rules and procedures, some remarkably picayune down to the color of ink required for petition signatures. Ballot access laws had been toughened in many states during the 1930s when legislators were determined to keep Communist candidates from qualifying for the ballot. Just determining what the fifty different standards are is expensive and time-consuming, let alone then gathering the thousands of signatures and paying thousands of dollars in filing fees. The magnitude of the task is demonstrated by the fact that, as of this writing, even relatively established third parties in the United States, such as the Green and Libertarian Parties, have never qualified to be on the ballot in all fifty states in the same election year.
Nothing in our Constitution ordains our two-party system. The Founding Fathers had hoped to avoid the creation of political parties entirely. Yet, even as the two-party system took hold for good in 1832, there arose the first “third party” in the United States, the Anti-Masons, whose members believed the Masons were secretly conspiring to rule the country. That the first third party was based on a conspiracy theory will have special resonance when we return to the story of the Perot campaign. Third parties devoted to ending slavery, imposing Prohibition, opposing immigration, or promoting an expansion of the money supply and regulation of the railroads followed. Few of the candidates of these third parties received even 10 percent of the popular vote, and fewer still earned the only votes that matter—the ones cast in the Electoral College.29
In the twentieth century, the most successful third party candidacy before Perot was that of former president Theodore Roosevelt. Disgusted by the conservative policies of his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, TR bolted the Republican Party to lead the Progressive Party in 1912. Roosevelt finished second in the presidential contest behind Woodrow Wilson and collected
more than 27 percent of the popular vote in a race that also saw a strong showing by the Socialist Party, whose candidate, Eugene Debs, collected 6 percent of the vote.
Three more times after Roosevelt, third party candidates managed to win electoral votes, but all were primarily regional candidates. Progressive senator Robert LaFollette carried only his home state of Wisconsin in 1924. South Carolina governor Strom Thurmond in 1948 and Alabama governor George Wallace in 1968, both running either explicitly or implicitly opposed to racial integration, won states only in the South. Between Wallace and Perot, the only other third party candidate to make a credible showing was Illinois congressman John Anderson in 1980, who won nearly 7 percent of the vote nationally but failed to carry a single precinct anywhere in the nation.
Most third parties, before Perot’s campaign, had followed historian Richard Hofstadter’s dictum that their role in U.S. politics “has not been to win or govern but to agitate, educate, generate new ideas, and supply the dynamic element in our political life.” Like bees, he added, “Once they have stung, they die.” But the rationale for Perot’s campaign was not promotion of a single cause or issue; it was based on the belief that he personally possessed the character traits needed for national leadership.
Perot’s image contrasted sharply with his two opponents, neither of whom inspired much public trust. George Bush Sr. had an approval rating of 90 percent during the Gulf War, but there was a widespread perception that he had no solutions to the recession, and he seemed removed from the economic concerns of struggling Americans. Meanwhile, the Democratic nominee for president, Bill Clinton, had character issues, highlighted by his admission on national television that he had been unfaithful to his wife—a charge that particularly bothered Perot, who would fire his employees if he thought them guilty of adultery.
Perot was seen as a breath of fresh air, endearing himself to voters with his plain talk (usually accompanied by easy-to-understand graphs and charts), his candor, his seeming lack of pretense, and his refusal to play the usual political games. When asked by Larry King if Bush should attend an environmental conference in Brazil, Perot happily acknowledged, “I don’t know a thing about it,” and when interviewed later about federal funding for abortions, Perot (who favored abortion rights) said he had not “spent ten minutes thinking about it.”
Perot was discovering that the usual rules did not apply to him, especially when it came to engaging the news media. He found that he could avoid the grilling by political reporters that the typical presidential candidate faced and that when he pushed back against the media it simply enhanced his reputation of not suffering fools gladly. When a national correspondent asked Perot if he had ever used illegal drugs, Perot responded, “No. Why, have you?” This belligerence delighted admirers who saw it as yet another sign that Perot shared their disdain for traditional elite institutions, above all the national news media.
Meanwhile, Perot found an alternate media universe in which to promote his candidacy, a universe that had not been opened to politicians before. He reached millions of voters with his message by submitting to amiable and nonconfrontational interviews conducted by the likes of Larry King and Oprah Winfrey. The talk show format also helped convey a sense of intimacy with his audience. During the relatively abbreviated 1992 campaign, Perot appeared on thirty-three such programs, in which he was able to convey that while fabulously wealthy, he was still, as those who admired him maintained, an ordinary man who had never lost “the basic East Texas values of compassion, patriotism, and hard work.” Every presidential candidate since has emulated his use of these nontraditional venues for political talk.
Perot tended to avoid traditional political talk shows in large part because he was not used to—and did not tolerate—being challenged. He became so upset by Tim Russert’s questioning on NBC’s Meet the Press that, while he kept his cool during the interview, afterward he threatened to end his campaign. But if he could avoid hard interviews, he could not avoid the media scrutiny given to anyone who has a genuine chance to be elected president, and it seemed that Perot might have that chance.
Within weeks of his conditional announcement in February, Perot was at 16 percent in early presidential preference polling, trailing Bush’s 44 percent and Clinton’s 31 percent; by May, a CNN/Time survey showed Perot in the lead at 33 percent, with Bush at 28 percent and Clinton at 24 percent. But it was the beginning of the end. Reporters were dredging up old stories about his fights with GM, his conspiracy theories regarding the POWs and MIAs, his efforts to scuttle the Vietnam War Memorial because he did not like its design, and many more. Perot discovered he could not control what the media wanted to discuss. He gave a speech on how to revitalize the American automobile industry, but afterward reporters wanted to ask him to clarify remarks he had made the day before on gay rights. Perot favored gay rights but had given an interview where he said he would probably not appoint an openly gay person to his Cabinet because the controversy would distract from more important issues.
He was also certain that he was again under government surveillance and that the Republicans, particularly, were planning to sabotage his campaign. He may have been “projecting,” for many among his campaign staff believed that Perot had tapped their phones and done extensive background checks on each of them. Perot did not deny it and instead justified it by saying he had a right to know who was working for him and acting as a representative of his campaign.
As Perot moved up in the polls, his key advisors, most from Perot Systems, the company Perot founded after he sold EDS to GM, believed the campaign needed professional help. Perot was persuaded to hire two high-profile consultants, one Democrat and one Republican. The Democrat was Hamilton Jordan, who had managed Jimmy Carter’s successful 1976 campaign and then served as Carter’s chief of staff. The Republican was Ed Rollins, who had managed Reagan’s 1984 re-election. Their hiring gave Perot yet another bump in the polls. With two political winners on board, more and more voters began to consider that Perot truly had a chance to take the White House.
The addition of traditional political consultants to the Perot campaign proved as dysfunctional as Perot’s union with GM. Perot vetoed most of Rollins’s and Jordan’s ideas. He was furious when Rollins went on the Sunday talk shows without his permission and suspected Rollins of leaking negative information to the press. While Rollins and Jordan said Perot told them he would be willing to spend whatever it took to win, he rebelled against their strategy and its one hundred fifty million dollar price tag. 30 Despite his inclination to occasionally tap his great fortune for quixotic ventures, Perot was actually quite careful with his money. As one associate noted, “Ross Perot did not get to be a billionaire by giving people blank checks.”
Mostly, Perot just did not want to run a conventional campaign. When Jordan pressed Perot to begin running television commercials in the summer, which Perot did not want to do until fall, he gave Jordan such a dressing down that the former presidential chief of staff suffered an anxiety attack so severe that Rollins worried he was having a heart attack. When Perot began yelling at Rollins for some similar transgression, Rollins walked out on Perot, saying he would not be “treated like one of your busboys here.”
In short, Perot wasn’t having any fun. Plus, all the negative media coverage, including rumblings about disharmony within his campaign, had dropped him into third place in the polls. Having fired Rollins on July 15, the next day, just as the Democrats were meeting to officially nominate Clinton, Perot announced he was withdrawing from a presidential race he had actually never officially entered. He said he could quit with a clear conscience because the “Democratic Party had revitalized itself.” He also expressed the fear that his candidacy would only throw the election into the House of Representatives, where he could not possibly win.
And yet . . . Perot did not close down operations in states where petitions were still being circulated to get him on the ballot. Back o
n CNN’s Larry King Live, King asked Perot if he wasn’t still holding out the possibility he might get back in the race. “That’s the magic, Larry,” Perot replied. In mid-September, it was announced that Perot had finally qualified to be on the ballot in all fifty states, should he run for president. Rumors that he would get back in the race swirled. Perhaps, some surmised, this had been his master strategy all along. But first, Perot decided to have some fun at the expense of the Republicans and Democrats.
He invited representatives from each party to come to Dallas and make presentations to Perot supporters in a bid for their support. The dog-and-pony show occurred on September 28 with Democrats doing their best to woo Perot and keep him out of the race, while Republicans seemed to muff their presentation deliberately as they had decided Bush’s only chance at victory, given that he seemed stuck at 40 percent in the polls, was to get Perot back in the race where 40 percent could win the election.31
Once more playing the role of Cincinnatus, seemingly reluctant to take power, Perot announced the next day that he had received 1.5 million telephone calls, urging him to re-enter the race, and that “I have, accepted their request.” As he re-entered the race on October 1, he was down to 7 percent in the polls.
But now, with barely a month left before the election, Perot could run the type of campaign he had wanted to. He declined to give public speeches and continued to avoid news interviews. He appeared mostly in thirty-minute or hour-long infomercials that, according to Perot biographer Gerald Posner, looked like “low-budget corporate training films,” but which cost as much as five hundred thousand dollars per half hour slot. (Perot would eventually spend seventy million dollars of his own money on his campaign, half what Jordan and Rollins had suggested.) The infomercials, with Perot wielding a series of charts while talking directly into the camera, were parodied mercilessly on comedy shows, but they were remarkably effective with voters. His first infomercial, titled The Problems—Plain Talk about Jobs, Debt, and the Washington Mess, drew 16.5 million viewers in winning its time slot in the Nielsen ratings.
