Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 29, 1992 TAG: 9203290286
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: F-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By SONNI EFRON and J. MICHAEL KENNEDY
DATELINE: DALLAS LENGTH: Long
The people who walk into the offices of the "Perot Petition Committee" say they have no alternative. President Bush has wrecked the economy, they say, and the likely Democratic alternative, Bill Clinton, is flawed.
The obstacles to a Perot candidacy are gargantuan, but this does not faze his enthusiasts. In the tough-talking Texas billionaire, they see an American folk hero with the brains, the guts and the instinct for the bottom line that is needed to rejuvenate America.
"I just believe we're in a sad state of affairs in this country and the leadership is not getting the job done," said Joe Odom, a warehouseman for the Procter & Gamble Corp. "It is like the latter days of Rome."
Perot has said that he will run for president as an independent only if "ordinary people" want him badly enough to place his name on the ballot in all 50 states.
It is an audacious challenge, egotistical perhaps, but not out of character for the gritty, 61-year-old former salesman who founded a $2.5 billion computer services company, went to bat for American prisoners in Hanoi and Tehran and survived a boardroom brawl with General Motors Chairman Roger Smith.
Perot's fans want to make it happen. Last week, folks like Odom were dropping by the "draft Perot" offices on the second floor of a mirrored tower in North Dallas to add their names to petitions that would get his name on the Texas ballot in November.
Calls were pouring in from around the country at the rate of 2,000 an hour, swamping the 100 telephone lines. Volunteers were taking down names, addresses and phone numbers to be entered into a computer data bank, and promising to send ballot instructions specific to the caller's state.
"I guess that I'm typical in that I am fed up with the current political setup and the lack of choice for president," said Wayne Snow, a Miami, Okla., salesman who stopped by to pick up a ballot petition while driving through Dallas.
"I think our system is corrupt from Bush on down," Snow said. "I think things have to get bad before people get out and do something about it. And now they're that bad."
Never mind conventional political wisdom, which says a jug-eared political novice - even an industrial titan with a fortune ranked 21st in the nation by Forbes magazine - may be asked to visit the White House but is unlikely to be invited for a permanent stay.
Never mind the history of independent and third-party candidates, which ranks somewhere between pathetic and disastrous.
And never mind this nation's two-party tradition, which dictates that even if Perot were to catch fire in this politically restless spring, Americans in November would be ill-inclined to "throw their vote away" on him.
However, if the draft movement is successful, an anti-Washington candidacy could attract enough disaffected voters to become a serious factor in the fall, especially because the self-financed campaign Perot has described would not face the same federal spending restrictions imposed on the publicly funded major-party candidates.
In the C-SPAN interview, Perot said he would spend $50 million to $100 million of his own money on a campaign, although he said he would encourage his supporters to contribute $5 "because I want them to have skin in the game. Anybody who knows me understands that if and when we ever get to that point we will really run a first-class campaign, not a low-budget campaign."
But Perot's colorful and often controversial statements, including his outspoken opposition to the Persian Gulf War, might provide his major-party opponents with material to fight off such a challenge.
"We rescued the emir of Kuwait," Perot said during an interview on C-SPAN last week. "Now if I knock on your door and say I'd like to borrow your son to go to the Middle East so that this dude with 70 wives, who's got a minister for sex to find him a virgin every Thursday night, can have his throne back, you'd probably hit me in the mouth." Before the gulf crisis, Kuwaiti Emir Jabir Ahmed Sabah was widely thought to have married and divorced often and possibly had scores of wives. Under Islamic law, he can have no more than four wives at any one time.
No independent or third-party candidate has ever won a presidential election. John Anderson withdrew from the Republican race in 1980 to run as a third-party candidate and won less than 7 percent of the popular vote that fall.
In the end, the Perot for President movement is not about politics. It is about the old American yearning for a populist cowboy on a white horse who will gallop into town, round up all the rascals, ride corruption out and return control to the people.
"We own this country; the guys in Washington work for us," Perot repeatedly says in the interviews and appearances that have helped spark the "draft" movement.
Politicians are our servants, but are behaving like "kings and emperors" at taxpayer expense because we let them, Perot argues. Americans have become "absentee owners" who have stopped taking personal responsibility for making the nation work, he chides.
Perot for President also is about the perennial quest to restore the nation to its righteous place as a shining city on a hill - or, in the anxious spirit of 1992, at least to keep America at the top of the economic heap.
"We've got to out-think, out-invent and out-produce our international business competitors." Perot exhorts. "We've got to be economically strong to be a force for good throughout the world. We can be a shining beacon to the rest of the world whose best days are in the future."
Like Republican Pat Buchanan and Democrat Jerry Brown, the two protest candidates who have emerged from the major parties this season, Perot has pitched his ideological tent far away from Washington.
The city "has become a town filled with sound bites, shell games, handlers and media stuntmen, who posture, create images and talk, shoot off Roman candles, but don't ever accomplish anything," Perot said March 18 in a speech to the National Press Club.
And although Perot is easily as combative as Buchanan and as iconoclastic as Brown, his folksy style and his East Texas twang seem to mute any vitriol.
"The folks in the Congress and the White House, in my judgment, are not villains on this whole economic situation," he said. "They just don't know what to do. Most of them are either lawyers or career politicians. They don't understand business, so they just stand there frozen, worrying about their images, taking polls, bouncing personal checks, and raising money from foreign lobbyists as the economy deteriorates."
Perot worries most about a federal debt that has quadrupled from $1 trillion when Reagan took office in 1981 to $4 trillion today.
"Can we agree that going $4 trillion into debt did not create Utopia?" he asked the press club.
And though he clearly delights in tough talk, his message is also inclusive.
"We're divided by racial strife. I just hate this." Perot said in his press club speech. "We're a melting pot, right? OK, we ought to love one another. That takes care of most of us. You've got a few hard-core haters. My advice to them is just pretty simple and blunt: Nobody is going to leave the country. Nobody is going anywhere. We're stuck with one another. Let's get along."
Some of Perot's proposals smack of the slash-and-burn conservatism of Ronald Reagan. He told the National Press Club that he would shrink the federal government, gut the White House, Cabinet and congressional staffs, and push for line-item budget veto power for the president, in part so that Bush would "stop whining about it."
Some Perot positions cut against the conservative grain. He thinks a woman must make her own decision on abortion. He advocates tougher gun control. He would ban political action committees from contributing to political campaigns.
Perot has called for the creation of a new tax system, including a constitutional amendment to cut off Congress's ability to raise taxes; laws restricting former government officials from lobbying for foreign governments; and the elimination of most congressional and executive branch perquisites. "Let everybody [in Washington] go to the airport, get in line, lose their luggage, eat a real meal and get a taste of real life," he said.
To cut spending, Perot said international allies should repay the United States for their defense and has proposed cutting off Social Security and Medicare payments for higher-income retirees. "For example, I get along all right without mine," he said.
A graduate of the Naval Academy, Perot is best known as the patriotic, "can-do" computer company executive who hired a team of commandos to rescue two employees who were taken hostage in Iran in 1979. The Reagan administration sought his financial help in freeing American hostages in Lebanon in the 1980s. He also has championed prisoner-of-war and missing-in-action causes and led an educational reform effort for then Democratic Texas Gov. Mark White in 1984.
And yet, Perot insists that he would rather his fans find someone else to support this November. "The people who are intrigued with it, who are willing to go out there and promise anybody anything any time are driven by ego and their desire for power," he said on C-SPAN. "I'm not lusting to do this thing."
The voter dismay and even disgust that Perot seems to be tapping are hardly new features on the American political landscape. But they may loom larger than at any time since the post-Watergate election of 1974.
"I have no desire to be president," Perot said last Sunday on ABC's "This Week With David Brinkley." "My personal feelings are anybody intelligent enough to be able to do the job would not want the toughest, dirtiest, most thankless job in the world, that is absolutely brutal on your family and everybody you love."
But he would take it: "It's up to the people."
The Washington Post contributed information to this article.
Keywords:
POLITICS
by CNB