ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, October 29, 1996 TAG: 9610290075
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER STAFF WRITER
Ross Perot wants voters to consider the following:
If you were lying wounded on a battlefield, which of the three leading presidential candidates would you want to come and get you?
If you and your spouse were killed in a car crash, which candidate would you want to adopt your children?
Which would you want your daughter to marry?
The Reform Party candidate fired those questions Monday at more than 3,000 people packed into Virginia Tech's Burruss Hall Auditorium, and several thousand more crowded around a large-screen television outside. It was Perot's only Virginia campaign stop and the first time in eight years that a national political campaign had stopped in the New River Valley.
Perot trails the major party candidates significantly in most polls but re-emerged as a major player in the race last week when Republican Bob Dole's campaign urged the Texan to withdraw from the race and throw his support behind the GOP.
Perot refused, with relish. Monday, the billionaire businessman and Naval Academy graduate, stuck with his message that both Democrats and Republicans are running the country into the ground with overspending. Perot had signs attached on the curtain behind him showing the size of the national debt, tax rate, Social Security and Medicare costs, and one chart showing red bar graphs representing the debt rising like a staircase from 1975 to 2000.
Perot said that 1992 exit polls showed that, if Americans had voted their consciences, he would have won. He urged his audience not to be swayed by "cynical" and "manipulative" advertising that a Perot vote is a wasted one.
He said he wanted the votes of young people - the crowd was overwhelmingly made up of college students - because the main reason he is in the race is to head off a massive national debt with which they will be stuck if things continue as they are.
"We are making a mistake in our generation that no previous American generation has ever made," he told the crowd outside. "We are spending your money. You will be paying a terrible price for our stupidity. I won't let that happen. I want to educate the American public so our two political parties won't let that happen."
Perot said he can win this time if America's veterans and small-business community support him.
"Everybody west of the Mississippi River is needed to pay the interest on the national debt. And that line is moving east. Our No.1 growth industry in the United States is government," he said.
"No other candidate gives you these facts, gives you these figures, talks to you bluntly like this. They all want to listen to Lawrence Welk music - 'Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful,''' he said. "We can do it, if we don't get manipulated here in the last couple weeks."
He criticized both major parties as being "bought and paid for" by special-interest campaign money, and for pouring platitudes on the problem of the national debt, but, on the subject of character, he was harder on President Clinton than Dole.
"For heaven's sake, don't put anybody in office that you wouldn't hire as an employee in your business," he said. "You have the president and his wife subjected to an ongoing criminal investigation. We're going to have Watergate II. No ifs, ands or buts."
Perot said the deficit problem is fixable, but not if the president is distracted by criminal proceedings. "We can't lose two years while we have Watergate II," he said.
Perot, with the Tech Corps of Cadets in prime reserved seats below him, focused on an unusual stump-speech topic: war.
As president, Perot said, he would have a sign on his desk to make sure the nation fell into no more Vietnams: "First, commit the nation, then commit the troops." If the nation were not committed, he said, he would not send the troops.
"I know what war is. Hell would freeze over before I would go to war to get a bump in the polls. In World War II, FDR's sons flew missions. That's the way it ought to be," he said. In the Persian Gulf War, only three members of Congress had sons there.
"War is a constant in history. Man is a warlike animal," he said. "If we go to war, I would impose a daily sacrifice on every citizen."
He said he would require every taxpayer to pay a "war tax." If someone refused, he said, "I'd say, `Fine. Here's a weapon. Here's a uniform. Go over there and shoot.'''
After his hour-long indoor speech, Perot moved outside and gave an abbreviated version with a hand-held microphone. He recalled rejoining his wife when he got out of the Navy, with everything they owned in the trunk of his car. And they were as happy then, he said, as now when he is a billionaire.
"When I was just 32 years old, I had a one-man organization with just $1,000 in the bank," he said. Now he has 95,000 employees and a business generating annual revenue of $12 billion. He said he wanted to keep the nation as a place where people can still achieve that kind of success through hard work and skill, and that was another reason he was seeking the presidency.
LENGTH: Medium: 98 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ALAN KIM/Staff. About 3,000 people packed into Virginiaby CNBTech's Burruss Hall Auditorium, and several thousand more crowded
around a large-screen television outside to hear Reform Party
candidate Ross Perot. color. KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENT