Almost President (39 page)

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.
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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 on 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.
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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.

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.”
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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 support. 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.