Perot in ‘92?
How he could win-and how he could blow it.
(Page 2 of 2)
A presidential election is really fifty separate state elections. It is mathematically possible to win the presidency by carrying only the eleven most populous states. What’s more, in a three-way race it is not necessary to win a majority of the votes to carry a state. Just 34 percent will do, if the other two candidates each get 33. In practice, 40 percent of the vote would be enough to lock up any state for Perot. That figure is within reach for him in many states. An NBC exit poll of primary voters found that roughly one person in four plans to vote for Perot in the general election. He should do much better among independent voters who weren’t disposed to vote in the party primaries. All of the early Perot boom has occurred even though he is not officially in the race and hasn’t begun to woo voters. But he still must overcome the biggest pitfall facing every underdog outsider candidate. He must convince the public that he is not just a protest candidate but that he actually has a chance to win.
The Ferraro Factor
No one understands this better than Perot’s campaign manager, Dallas attorney Tom Luce. Reflecting on his own loss to Clayton Williams in the 1990 Republican primary for governor, Luce said, “I never realized how important it is for people to feel that their vote counts. I can’t tell you how many times somebody told me, ‘You’re the best-qualified candidate. It’s a shame you’re not going to win.’ I’d tell them, ‘If everybody who felt that way would vote for me, I might win.’ But they thought they would just be throwing away their vote.”
Washington-based pollsters Peter Hart and Vince Breglio call this phenomenon the Ferraro Law of Politics, in mock honor of Geraldine Ferraro, who proved to be a washout as Walter Mondale’s vice-presidential nominee in 1984. “For the unknown candidate, the faster and sharper the ascent, the greater the likelihood of a quick and sudden drop if the candidate does not meet expectations,” Hart and Breglio wrote in presenting an NBC—Wall Street Journal poll.
The lesson for Perot is that he must move to solidify his support—and move quickly. The public has shown that it likes him, but it also doesn’t know much about him. In the next few months, maybe the next few weeks, Ross Perot is going to be defined in the public’s mind. The only question is who will do the defining. Will it be reporters like Sam Donaldson, who said that Perot “would make an awful president” because “he doesn’t have the ability to understand that compromise is what makes a political system work”? Or will it be Perot himself?
You only need to look as far as Bill Clinton to see what can happen to a highly regarded but little-known candidate. It would be the news of the decade if Perot had any Gennifer Flowers or I-didn’t-inhale skeletons in his closet, but other potentially damaging incidents have already seen the light of day: dallying with Oliver North; lobbying for government grants, tax breaks, and contracts; calling for house-to-house searches for drugs; feuding with anybody who disagrees with him; prying into the personal lives of his executives at EDS by imposing a rule against marital infidelity.
The portrait that Perot’s critics will try to draw of him is that of a rich businessman who doesn’t know anything about government, whose business dealings are open to question, whose social attitudes are out of touch with reality, and who won’t endorse specific policies for fear of revealing his ignorance and committing gaffes. Does this sound familiar? It should: It’s exactly the portrait Ann Richards successfully drew of Clayton Williams, who was generous enough to supply ample quantities of paint.
Perot can explain away most of the criticism. Sure, he insisted on fidelity. “If your wife can’t trust you,” he said during the David Frost interview, “how can I?” Sure, he’s gotten rich on government contracts. He’s living proof that the government is as inept as he says it is; it had to hire him to process its own Medicaid claims. Sure, Alliance Airport, his latest deal, was built with $46 million in federal funds and is seeking $120 million more. But the airport is owned and operated by the City of Fort Worth, on land donated by Perot; he just retained the land around it.
The trouble is, political candidates seldom win by explaining. They win by giving voters such a strong sense of who they are and what they stand for that criticism has little effect. Remember Claytie. The real miracle is not that he lost, but that he almost won: The strong image he had built of himself through television shielded him from every attack except self-destruction. Perot needs to define himself right now, filling in the missing details of his life and personality, before he finds himself defined by others. As a onetime supersalesman for IBM, Perot ought to understand what is at stake. This is the moment to close the deal with his early supporters—or else risk a sharp dip in the polls that would render him just another victim of the Ferraro Law.
Pitfalls
Ross Perot has been successful so far because he is not a politician. To start acting like one now would be the worst mistake he could make. His campaign must be different from what voters are used to; since television will be the heart of his campaign, his ads must be different. The typical thirty-second TV spot with a voice-over and shots of the candidate in his shirt-sleeves will not work. It is too slick.
A national Democratic consultant says that he would recommend that Perot do only long programs: a few two-minute spots, but mostly five- and even thirty-minute shows on network television. “He has to make himself larger than life,” the Washington-based consultant said. “Blanket the networks. Show that he speaks more loudly than the media.” Another consultant suggests live call-in TV. Whatever he does, however, Perot must do his own talking: no voice-overs. The more he sticks to simple, straightforward, informative ads about who he is, the more shallow and stupid the thirty-second spots used by his opponents will look.
Perot must also remember that his main opponent for the next few months is the media, not George Bush or Bill Clinton. The reporters are out to test him, to trap him, to define him. The big battle will be over the specifics of his programs, and it has already begun. Under the headline Perot Offers Less Than Any Politician, a columnist for the Portland Oregonian wrote: “It’s his airy disinterest in issues that makes Perot not the solution to our political problem, but a symptom of them.” A New York Times front-page headline proclaimed, Perot Goes Heavy on Drama and Light on Details. Meanwhile, Times columnist A. M. Rosenthal offered Perot a little advice. “A Perot drug plan will be examined and criticized—no question,” he wrote. “All the more reason for him to bring out the drug plan now, and any other specific ideas he has to deal with crime, budget, defense, jobs, housing, and Saddam Hussein.”
Hogwash. The only thing that getting specific will achieve is controversy, which is in the media’s interest, not Perot’s. The reporters will pick apart the proposals, the single-issue groups will be roused to action, and self-interest once again will dictate how people vote. Perot is finished if that occurs. He must focus the debate not on programs but on the things he believes matter more: leadership and will.
The final pitfall Perot must guard against is the fatal gaffe. He can get away with being testy with the media; he can get away with being vague on issues; but he cannot get away with a mistake that reveals him to be bigoted, selfish, petty, foolish, or weak—in short, anything diametrically opposed to the public image of Ross Perot. He already made one mistake when he engaged in self-serving criticism of the Bush administration for holding up funds for Alliance Airport. The strain of constant public scrutiny is a hard crucible, and Perot has never been through it.
The Odds
Can Ross Perot be elected president? William F. Buckley described the deluge of calls to Perot’s phone banks as “about as meaningful as a million calls proposing Vanessa Redgrave be named Queen of England.” That’s selling Perot short. Some of Perot’s close associates, on the other hand, believe his chance of winning to be as good as 50 percent. That’s too high. Too much can go wrong for an independent candidate. The president controls the national agenda. He reacts to a major event like the riots following the Rodney King verdict, and his every move is on television for days. Ross Perot issues a statement on the riots—a good statement, by the way—and it gets lost. Both Bush and Clinton have the advantage of widely viewed national conventions to kick off their campaigns. Perot has no margin for error: no mistakes, no poor commercials, no slumps in the polls.
Then again, he’s not exactly running against the likes of Dwight Eisenhower and Franklin Roosevelt. If Perot can remain a credible candidate through the fall campaign, and the economy and the world situation do not change, then the Perot camp’s odds are right: He is an even bet to win. He will have to hold his western base together, carry Florida, Michigan, and North Carolina, and then win some close battles in industrial states—Ohio, Pennsylvania, even New York.
There is, of course, a third possibility: that none of the candidates will get a majority of the electoral votes. Then the next president would be chosen by the House of Representatives, where each state delegation would have one vote. The Democrats’ numerical advantage would seem to guarantee a Clinton victory, but … what if Perot leads in both the popular and electoral vote and Clinton finishes a weak third? Will Perot carry on the fight, setting off lobbying and maneuvering and deal making such as American politics has never seen? If so, the ultimate result of Ross Perot’s bid for the presidency, made for the purpose of restoring the public’s faith in the political process, would be to further erode it.
Pages: 1 2
My Library
