Perot in ‘92?
How he could win-and how he could blow it.
The next time Ross Perot appears on a TV talk show, try this experiment: Turn off the sound, take a good look at him, and try to remember when you last saw someone who looks so downright ordinary on television. When he listens to a question, his eyes glint warily and his forehead arches with suspicion, as if he were a character actor undergoing cross-examination on an old episode of Perry Mason. And then there are those ears. By all the conventions of the sound-bite era, it is impossible that Ross Perot could be elected president of the United States.
Yet it is precisely because Perot stands so directly in opposition to the conventional wisdom—not just about television but about all of modern American politics—that he has a realistic chance to win. Perot is the candidate of the disaffected, the disenchanted, the fed up: the people whose contempt for politics has passed beyond cynicism to despair. They instinctively understand that campaigning has supplanted governing as the primary focus of contemporary politics. They know that for today’s officeholders, polling has replaced judgment, pandering has replaced policy, and attacking the opposition has replaced debate. The Perot ground swell is a revolution against the way politics is practiced.
That is why Perot’s quirky television personality actually works in his favor. The adage “the medium is the message” does not apply to Ross Perot. He is the message. Now the question is, How many voters will decide to deliver it?
Spirit of the Times
All through the spring, polls and presidential primaries documented the dissatisfaction of the American people. Was the country headed in the right direction? In an NBC—Wall Street Journal poll, 70 percent said no; just 17 percent said yes. How interested are elected officials in solving the nation’s problems? Not very interested, said 64 percent of those surveyed by ABC News. Is the presidential campaign mainly about the nation’s biggest problems? No, said 71 percent of the voters in the same poll.
But it takes more than voter disgruntlement for an independent candidate to have a plausible chance to win. John Anderson—remember him?—stood at 24 percent in national polls in the spring of 1980, about where Perot stands now. On election day he had just 6 percent and zero electoral votes. Perot, however, has three advantages that Anderson lacked. First, he is not a politician; therefore he is a more credible insurgent. Second, he can finance a $100 million campaign personally, out of petty cash—a few months’ interest on his $3 billion fortune. Third, his personality fits the mood of the times. At a time of government gridlock, he projects an image of action. You can bet that Perot’s TV ads will recount how he led a mercy mission to North Vietnam to aid American prisoners of war, how he arranged to rescue two employees of his company from an Iranian prison, and how he spearheaded a reform of Texas education. “If the people don’t want action,” he told David Frost in a PBS interview, “if they don’t want these problems solved, if they don’t want aggressive programs to get rid of the violence in the communities, to rebuild the cities, to get this country back on track, to stop the deterioration of the job base and the tax base, they don’t want me.”
A pro—Bill Clinton political consultant was deeply impressed by that brief speech. “Notice how he puts the burden on the voter,” he said. “It’s just like his petition drive. The press makes fun of it, but Perot is saying, ‘I want you to decide if I should run. I am empowering you to decide.’ He makes voters feel that they are important to him.”
“Empowerment” is the fashionable word of the moment. It refers to the decentralization of authority: letting the people on the front lines participate in decisions. (Site-based management for public schools is an example of empowerment that is much in vogue.) Throughout his career, Ross Perot has always been ahead of the pack in deciphering the spirit of the times—the potential of computers, the danger of drugs, the failure of education—and empowerment is no exception. It was the root of his celebrated fight with General Motors in the mid-eighties. As a member of GM’s board, Perot came to the conclusion that executives paid no attention to what kind of cars customers wanted. When he kept making the point publicly, GM got rid of him by buying his stock for $700 million.
Few things are more powerful in politics than the sense that a candidate is right for the moment. Jimmy Carter went from being a former governor of Georgia to president of the United States mainly because the public wanted an honorable man (“I’ll never lie to you”) to erase the memory of Watergate. Ronald Reagan made the leap from actor to governor to president because the public wanted less government in their lives. Ross Perot’s early success is a measure of how well he fits his time. He is, at least on first impression, what the people say they want: someone who figures out what needs to be done without taking a poll, who doesn’t care about partisanship and blaming the other side, who is interested only in making government work. “I would disappear,” he said during an appearance on CBS This Morning, “if they [the Bush administration] would start taking action and quit talking.”
The Strategy
For a man who has made $3 billion in the computer industry, Ross Perot operates a surprising amount of the time on instinct and hunch. So it is with his campaign strategy. No one can sit down with a pencil and say, “Here’s how we get to 270 electoral votes.” In fact, the people close to Perot all talk about the same four states—California, Texas, Florida, and Michigan. California alone has 54 electoral votes, exactly one fifth the amount needed to win; together, Perot’s big four have 129 votes—almost halfway home. That’s a start, but it’s not a strategy.
California, a state partial to eccentric politicians, produced the most remarkable statistic of the primary season in a late April Los Angeles Times poll. Almost half of the people interviewed (49 percent) said they didn’t know enough about Ross Perot to express an opinion about him; yet Perot finished just one percentage point behind George Bush in the poll, with 32 percent to Bush’s 33 and Bill Clinton’s 26. Perot had the opportunity to influence how half the voters felt about him, and he made the most of it. By early May, he led Bush by six percentage points. Willie Brown, an East Texas emigrant who is now the Speaker of the California Assembly, suggested that the Democratic party consider drafting Perot as its presidential candidate. The California poll followed the news from home that Perot led in a statewide Texas poll with 35 percent, ahead of Bush, who had 30, and Clinton, who had 20. For the first time, the inside-the-beltway crowd in Washington began to regard Perot seriously. “If he comes across, I think he can win,” said 1988 Democratic presidential contender Dick Gephardt, now House majority leader. (It should be noted that Perot family members have contributed $20,000 to Gephardt.)
The polls were no flukes. Perot fits the myths of the West—fluidity, rebirth, opportunity, simple virtues—far better than Easterner Bush or Southerner Clinton. That is why Perot’s strategy for winning the presidency must eventually target the states west of the Rockies as his base—not just Texas and California but all of them. Even Hawaii, which voted for Walter Mondale in 1984 and Michael Dukakis in 1988, is possible Perot country; patriotism plays well in the only state that has been exposed to foreign attack since the War of 1812. Only Utah, where the economy has been propped up by companies fleeing California, may be too Republican for him to win.
Still, to become president, Perot will have to get more than half of his electoral votes from the eastern side of the country. He is counting on Florida’s 25 electoral votes because his strongest support comes from older voters with at least a high school education. Michigan (18 electoral votes) makes Perot’s short list because union workers will be reminded of Perot’s attack on General Motors management. (On the other hand, someone might remind them that Perot didn’t look kindly on unions at his own company, Electronic Data Systems.)
And then what? Possibly Pennsylvania, where the steel industry suffers from competitiveness problems and Democratic governor Bob Casey has openly questioned Clinton’s electability. North Carolina is a high-tech state where the president of NationsBank (formerly NCNB), Hugh McColl, is a longtime Perot friend. Maybe Okla-homa, where 1,600 people responding to a TV call-in poll gave Perot a whopping 69 percent of their votes. Probably not Illinois: The Chicago machine will be able to keep Democrats from defecting to Perot.
My Library
