Jude’s post onconnecting with an old friend who had gone a bit crazy made me wonder what happened to an old eccentric friend of mine: H. Ross Perot. For those of you who didn’t lock in on politics until after 1992, the name likely conjures a vision of an insane twerp who wasa great parody subject of Dana Carvey. However, if you were there in 1992 and you had a drop of non-conformist blood in you, Ross Perot was amazing.
Here was a guy who was dumping his own money into a Quixotic presidential campaign. He managed to force his way onto the stage next to Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush. He poked the establishment, he ruffled feathers and he gave us a chance to believe that he could pull this off. Long before the “Straight Talk Express” rolled out a line of malarkey that was anything but, Perot gave it to us straightwhen it came to the economy andmade a straightforward pitch for your vote. If you saw the commercials back then, they were magic. If you watch them now, they don’t seem all that different from what we’re hearing from Obama: a different message that gives us hope.
He garnered 19 percent of the popular vote, more than any other “third-party” candidate of our time. He is likely the reason we got Clinton instead of Bush (view that however you’d like). Clinton won the election without a mandate (43 percent of the popular vote), which was due in large part to Perot. While he won, you’ve got imagine that made it clear he’d have to work a little harder, and probably on some of the issues Perot was bringing up. He wasn’t going to win over the hard-core Republicans, but Perot’s block of voters were potential targets and thus gave Clinton something to shoot for. Budget surplus, anyone?
In the years after 1992, Perot fought Al Gore on NAFTA, made a weird attempt to run for president again without running for president and kind of faded into the realm of an antiquated punch line. We never really heard much from him again and to me, that was a shame. Sure, he was like that nuts uncle who has a really good job but shows up at Thanksgiving dinner, eats too much and tells you weird stories about the time he ran naked through the cafeteria in college. He’s a bit crazy, but he’s not an idiot. He knew money, he knew people and he knew reality, even if it seemed at times that reality was more of a summer home than a permanent residence for him.
So whatever happened to the jug-eared wonder? Well, he’sback again calling out the folks who ran up the national debt to the point where they broke the debt clock. He’s also become afellow traveler on the internet. He’s all but said he wouldn’t run for president again, and that’s probably a good thing. He’s far better off being that voice of reason out there, unencumbered by the rigors of political office.
However, as a guy who drank the Kool-Aid, searched my ballot for him amid the other “non-majority party” candidates and then went home to watch CNN in hopes that he’d win at least one state, I have to think maybe we’re a little worse off for that decision. Guess we’ll never know…