Almost President

by Scott Farris

  More important, Perot was included in the televised presidential debates. Both the Republicans and Democrats, still unsure who Perot’s supporters were, wanted Perot to participate in the belief that he would either draw votes from the other side or self-destruct. Perot did well in the debates, his outsized personality contrasting nicely against the familiarity of Clinton and ennui of Bush. After the first debate, polls found 70 percent of Americans more inclined to vote for Perot based on his debate performance, and his standing in the polls rose to 13 percent. He did equally well in the next two debates, and he now had climbed to 19 percent in the polls with growing momentum. The negative publicity that dogged him after his withdrawal from the race, the headlines that called him “The Quitter,” and “The Yellow Ross of Texas,” were now forgotten, and his negative ratings had dropped in half to 33 percent.

  Then, he made the disastrous decision to explain why he had dropped out of the race back in July. On Sunday, October 25, Perot appeared on the CBS news show 60 Minutes and declared that he had dropped out of the race because he had been warned that Republican operatives intended to engage in a campaign of dirty tricks against him that would include disrupting his daughter’s wedding and publicizing a doctored photo that would purport to show his daughter engaging in lesbian sex. The FBI was quoted saying it had looked into Perot’s allegations, and there was no evidence to support them.

  Public reaction to the interview and a subsequent news conference was “catastrophic,” in the words of a Perot aide. Perot’s favorable-unfavorable ratings flipped overnight from 56 percent positive and 34 percent negative to 44 percent positive and 46 percent negative. With only a week until Election Day, there was no time left to repair the damage.

  Yet, on November 4, Perot still collected 19 percent of the popular vote. Only Theodore Roosevelt in 1912 had done better as a third party candidate. Perot won no states but finished second in two, behind Bush in Utah and behind Clinton in Maine. His level of support was remarkably consistent across the nation, and post-election surveys found 40 percent of voters would have considered voting for Perot if they had thought he could actually have won. This led Perot’s running mate, Admiral James Stockdale, to declare, “Ross showed you don’t have to talk to [ABC News political reporter] Sam Donaldson to get on television. Ross has shown that American candidates can now bypass the filters and go directly to the people.”32

  It was now clear, too, that Perot voters, despite their claim to being “zealots of the center,” were generally disaffected Republicans. While Perot supporters professed to be equally turned off by the cultural conservatism of the Republicans and the economic liberalism of Democrats, post-election surveys discovered that more than 70 percent of Perot voters had voted for Bush in 1988, and another poll found 62 percent of Perot voters had supported Reagan in 1980 or 1984 or in both years.

  What truly distinguished Perot’s supporters was that, while they may have been consistent voters, usually supporting conservative candidates, they were not typically active in partisan politics as volunteers or donors. Not being active in a political party fed their sense of alienation from the political system as a whole and reinforced their belief that traditional politics had not been responsive to their concerns.

  In 2010, the question arose whether the “Tea Party” movement was a descendant of the Perot movement. There were similarities in demographics, with both movements being overwhelmingly white, attracting more men than women, and involving people with income levels slightly above average. There were also shared concerns. Each began during times of economic distress, identified the budget deficit as a symbol of government failure, and professed to be composed of angry Washington outsiders who were previously not politically active.

  But there was a considerable difference in ideology and purpose. While leaning Republican, Perot voters identified themselves as being far more ideologically diverse than the Tea Party movement. Exit polls found that 53 percent of Perot voters in 1992 described themselves as moderate, 27 percent called themselves conservative, and 20 percent liberal. Surveys of Tea Party adherents found three-quarters declared themselves conservative and one-quarter moderate. The Tea Party seemed an adjunct wing or more likely, as commentator E. J. Dionne said, “right-wing Republicans organized under a new banner,” rather than an independent or third party movement. While the Tea Party, as of this writing, has been critical of past Republican leadership, its goal appears to be ensuring conservative control of the Republican Party, not mounting a challenge to the two-party system.

  While Perot had run as an independent in 1992, he decided in 1995 to create the Reform Party as a credible and enduring alternative to the Republicans and Democrats. At first, it was not clear whether Perot intended to use the Reform Party to run again for president himself in 1996. He still had many devoted followers from the 1992 election—and he still had several billion dollars at his disposal. In May 1993, U.S. News and World Report announced, “Ross Perot may be the most important force in American politics.” An economic nationalist, Perot was critical of the proposed North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). With congressional ratification of NAFTA expected to be a near-run thing, the Clinton White House concluded it had to confront Perot directly. They challenged him to debate Vice President Al Gore on Larry King Live on November 9, 1993, before a record cable television audience of sixteen million viewers.

  Gore, who tried to rattle Perot by sitting so close to him that their shoulders touched throughout the debate, projected calm, while Perot came across as testy, sarcastic, and evasive. Surveys showed support for NAFTA rose from 37 to 54 percent following the debate, while Perot’s favorable rating plummeted from 66 to 29 percent. Perot’s national political chances, born on Larry King’s show in February 1992, basically died on Larry King’s show twenty months later.

  But Perot still had national ambitions. In 1996, the day after former Colorado governor Richard Lamm announced he would seek the Reform Party nomination, Perot announced his candidacy. Part of his rationale for entering the race was that the Federal Election Commission ruled the Reform Party would receive federal matching campaign funds only if Perot was the party’s nominee since it was Perot who had qualified for the funds by running as an independent in 1992. But many in the party worried the Reform Party could not grow into a viable party as long as it was seen as a vanity vehicle for Perot. Continuing to experiment in how to engage voters outside the normal political process, the Reform Party did not hold a nominating convention but allowed interested party members to cast ballots for their nominee. Nearly fifty thousand participated and chose Perot over Lamm by a 65 to 35 percent margin. Lamm alleged the election was rigged, and so began years of legal wrangling that would ultimately ruin the Reform Party.

  Perot intended to reprise his 1992 campaign strategy, but he suffered a large blow when he was excluded from the presidential debates this time. The Clinton campaign was happy to include Perot, believing he would siphon votes away from Republican nominee Bob Dole, but the GOP was adamant that Perot should not participate. Perot complained bitterly about being excluded from an event that would attract eighty million viewers, calling the decision “a blatant display of power by the Republicans and the large donors who fund their campaign.”

  More importantly, the political ground had shifted. The Republicans in Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had made a bold play for Perot voters in the 1994 mid-term elections, winning back the House for the first time in forty years in large part by adopting key elements of Perot’s reform agenda, including a call for term limits and a balanced budget amendment. The Republicans’ “Contract with America” even mimicked Perot’s checklist for candidates that he had included in his materials for “United We Stand America,” the formal name he had earlier given his reform movement. The disaffected Republicans who had made up the bulk of Perot’s supporters had come home to the GOP. But there were other factors, too, that explain his diminished supp
ort. The economy was again prosperous, reducing voter discontent; NAFTA had not proved to be the disaster he had predicted; the Clinton administration had joined congressional Republicans in reforming the welfare system, a sign that it was not business as usual in Washington; and budget deficit projections were shrinking. Perot continued to air his infomercials, just as in 1992, but the campaign generated none of the excitement of four years before. Perot and his running mate, economist Pat Choate, received only 8.4 percent of the vote, less than half the 1992 count.

  The Reform Party seemed as if it might yet remain a viable entity when, in 1998, former professional wrestler and talk radio host Jesse Ventura was elected governor of Minnesota with 37 percent of the vote as the Reform Party candidate. But Ventura had a rocky tenure as governor and declined to run for a second term. Still, Perot had done well enough in 1996 that the Reform Party was again qualified to be on the ballot in at least forty-eight states in 2000.

  Were this book written in 2000, the Perot legacy would look much different from what it does today. Perot would be receiving credit not only for creating what seemed to be an ongoing viable third party, he would also be credited for being a driving force behind the remarkable budget deficit reductions that occurred during the 1990s. The Clinton administration, working with a predominantly Republican Congress, had picked up on Perot’s deficit reduction theme. A smaller federal workforce, tax increases, and an economic boom fueled by the high-tech industry all combined to eliminate annual budget deficits and create annual budget surpluses. There was even talk of reducing the accumulated national debt, and what to do with the projected budget surpluses was a key issue during the 2000 presidential campaign.

  But the 2000 election was the last hurrah for the Reform Party. Real estate developer Donald Trump initially announced he was interested in the party nomination but changed his mind, and the nomination instead went to conservative commentator Patrick Buchanan, who had sought the Republican nomination in 1992 and 1996. Buchanan tried to adopt some of Perot’s economic nationalism for his platform, but he remained best known for his conservative views on social issues, such as abortion. Those Perot voters wanting nothing to do with the “culture wars” fought to form rival Reform Party entities in their respective states. Despite appearing on forty-eight state ballots, Buchanan won less than a half percent of the popular vote, and even Perot announced he had voted for Republican George W. Bush.

  The ongoing legal battles among various local parties, each vying over which had the right to identify themselves as the official Reform Party entity, continued the party’s decline. With Perot no longer funding the effort, the remnants of the Reform Party in 2004 simply chose to endorse the independent candidacy of Ralph Nader, who won barely a third of a percent of the popular vote. In 2008, the Reform Party qualified for the ballot in only a single state, Mississippi, where its presidential candidate, a local businessman, received fewer than five hundred votes.

  More disheartening than the demise of the Reform Party was the reappearance of budget deficits. During the George W. Bush administration and the early years of Barack Obama’s administration, a combination of events—the bursting of the tech and housing “bubbles,” the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the two ensuing costly wars waged in response to those attacks, large tax reductions, increased spending on entitlements, and the collapse of the world financial markets—conspired to balloon federal deficits once more and increase the federal cumulative debt to fourteen trillion dollars in 2011. Fourteen trillion dollars was more than twice the debt a decade before and more than three times the level that had alarmed Perot and his followers back in 1992.

  Yet, Perot said virtually nothing publicly about the issue. He had all but disappeared from public view. In January 2008, he contacted Newsweek magazine to announce he was supporting former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a successful businessman and the son of the founder of American Motors, instead of former POW and Arizona senator John McCain in the Republican primary. He was still angry that McCain had called him “nuttier than a fruitcake” for persisting in his belief that there had been live POWs left behind in Southeast Asia.

  Perot also told Newsweek that he had launched a website with the kind of charts and graphs he had used to such great effect in 1992 to again educate Americans about the problems he had talked about in his two presidential campaigns but were still not resolved. As of 2011, it did not seem the site was being regularly updated, except for a counter that showed the national debt increasing at the rate of one hundred thousand dollars per second. A polarized political establishment seemed unable to address the issue, leading conservative New York Times columnist David Brooks to wonder if what the nation needed now was “a saner Perot.”

  26 Wendell Willkie, the utility executive who became the Republicans’ presidential nominee in 1940, is the rare non-media businessman to run for president, but the circumstances of his nomination were very unusual. He was also nominated more for his foreign policy views than for his business acumen.

  27 While the 2004 and 2008 campaigns increased voter identification with one of the two main parties, by 2010 the partisan affiliation numbers were back to being remarkably similar to those from 1993.

  28 In announcing his entry into the 2003 race to recall and replace California governor Gray Davis, Schwarzenegger also professed to be a reluctant candidate, saying, “I came to the conclusion that even though there are great sacrifices to make, I felt in the end it is my duty to jump in the race.” Schwarzenegger had been politically active and contemplating a political career for some time, but most voters, perhaps rightly, assumed being governor was a step down from being an action movie star. As he left office, Schwarzenegger insisted his seven years as governor had cost him two hundred million dollars in expenses and lost income.

  29 The Republican Party is sometimes called the only successful third party in American history, but the truth is that the Whig Party had already disintegrated before the Republican Party was formed and the Republicans simply filled the void.

  30 While the actual Bush and Clinton campaigns would each spend “only” about seventy million dollars each, when expenditures by their respective party organizations and affiliated groups are also taken into account, the total would be close to the one hundred fifty million dollars Jordan and Rollins believed Perot needed to spend to be competitive.

  31 Clinton would win with 43 percent of the popular vote to Bush’s 37 percent and Perot’s 19 percent.

  32 Admiral Stockdale’s role as Perot’s running mate should be explained, given the mirth Stockdale’s own vice presidential debate performance (“Who am I? Why am I here”) caused. In order to get on the ballot in some states, Perot had to have a running mate listed. Stockdale, a courageous Vietnam POW and longtime acquaintance of Perot’s, had been drafted into service as a surrogate running mate on the understanding he would later be replaced on the ticket. Perot had just begun to consider who his running mate might be when he dropped out of the race in July. When Perot got back in the race in October, there was no time to change the names on the ballots, so Stockdale stayed on the ticket.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  AL GORE, JOHN KERRY, AND JOHN MCCAIN

  2000, 2004, 2008

  “I’m the . . . loyal opposition. And both words, I think, are operative.”

  —John McCain

  In a nation that has fretted for decades over whether it has properly honored its Vietnam War veterans, it is ironic that the three presidential nominees who served in Vietnam—Al Gore, John F. Kerry, and John McCain—were all defeated, while the two men of the Vietnam generation who were elected president did not serve in Vietnam. Bill Clinton avoided military service entirely, while George W. Bush spent the war stateside as a member of the Texas Air National Guard.

  Yet each bucked the conventional wisdo
m of the time to serve, partly out of family obligation, partly out of idealism, and partly under the misapprehension that a military record would be necessary to pursue a career in public service. When Gore sought advice about whether to enlist in the army and risk being sent to Vietnam, one of his Harvard professors, Richard Neustadt, told him, “If you want to be part of the country twenty-five years from now, if you want any future in politics, you’ve got to serve.” Neustadt later ruefully acknowledged that he had given that advice from “a World War II perspective that didn’t prove to be exactly right.”

  While their status as veterans may not have been key to their later political success, their service certainly helped define Gore, Kerry, and McCain as different from other politicians of their generation who avoided service and as individuals who struggled with concepts of honor and duty more familiar to earlier generations of Americans. Similarly, these unsuccessful presidential candidates are, each in their own way, bucking the recent convention that losing presidential candidates should quietly fade from view. Instead, as they did in their decision to serve in Vietnam, they are looking to past traditions to reclaim a level of influence and power that losing presidential candidates once enjoyed. For this reason, this chapter looks at their experiences collectively to see if the role of presidential loser is being redefined.