A Vulgar Spectacle
the weekly Standard A Vulgar Spectacle 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...
...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...
...There has never been "spontaneous" grassroots support for anything associated with Ross Perot...
...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...
...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...
...That's probably the right conclusion...
...In his own home state of Texas, former governor Ann Richards is proof of that...
...In which case he will no longer deserve any press attention for the remainder of the year...
...Perot stands for nothing...
...Dark forces are again arrayed against him in 1996, he warns...
...When I say I want something, I want it...
...The organized pressure of their fall endorsements will force the next Congress finally to approve legislation necessary to save the nation from certain collapse...
...It's a clever and interesting numbers crunch...
...To the extent Perot succeeds in this cynical ploy, the quality and standards of American political discourse will be debased...
...Official 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...
...But the print and broadcast media need not even remotely entertain such partisan calculations...
...One guess is all you need...
...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...
...It is about our country...
...he is still "news...
...Never before had the nation's political stage been hijacked this way for the performance of one man's private psychodrama...
...Harold Stassen, after all, would never be invited to appear on Larry King...
...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...
...That's probably expecting too much...
...Whose particular interests does such a process protect...
...By encouraging a personality-focused campaign, Perotism advances the Democratic party's narrow, short-term interests...
...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...
...Not really...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...The party belongs to its members, he says...
...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...
...And here, Perot's daily, unavoidable presence in the campaign may prove the clincher...
...And among these freshly minted Perotistas, opinion breaks six-to-one for Clinton over Dole in a two-man field...
...But for this booty, the new Reform party would not, of course, exist...
...Bill Clinton will win a campaign of personalities...
...So what, then, is the Reform party about...
...David Tell, for the Editors...
...A presidential reelection campaign is almost always a referendum on the incumbent, they reason...
...Perot cannot yet be entirely ignored...
...And all at once...
...They are ordinary men and women repelled by special-interest-induced gridlock in Washington...
...But it strikes most Democratic and Republican strategists as counterintuitive...
...Gone are Ross's Bush-era diagrams and graphs...
...A three-way campaign this year will split the anti-Clinton vote...
...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...
...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...
...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...
...All of it...
...Its nominating convention won't take place until Labor Day, too late for the "winning" presidential candidate to attract sufficient contributions from workaday small donors...
...A bizarre conceit: On paper, at least, Perot may have been the least qualified presidential candidate in history...
...We may well be subjected to the same vulgar spectacle a second time...
...That American politics is so much "show business," in short, its choices mere popularity contests...
...His endorsement is a feeble weapon-and maybe even a boomerang...
...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...
...This "is not about me, Larry," he demurs...
...If Perot gets a respectable number of votes, the president wins...
...Sixty percent of Perot's current poll support is "new," derived from respondents who say they did not vote for him in 1992...
...Don't you understand...
...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...
...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...
...The most "sophisticated" such analysis, by Democratic pollster Peter Hart, says Perot strengthens Dole and weakens the president...
...Whom will Perot hurt more: Clinton or Dole...
...Today, four years later, that man is back...
...That candidate can only be a self-financing wealthy person, in other words...
...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...
...And their 1996 presidential candidate will not be a spoiler-and may even be someone other than Perot...
...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...
...Bob Dole may yet win an ideological campaign this year...
...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...
...The exit polls prove it...
...This charge he heatedly denies...
...From whose hide will this small bloc of voters come...
...And if they do their jobs correctly, we may still be spared another degraded campaign...
...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...
...Ross Perot is now, bogus denials to the contrary notwithstanding, a full-fledged, richly funded candidate for the presidency of the United States...
...Democrats were begging me to get out of the race" toward the end, he reveals...
Vol. 1 • April 1996 • No. 29
