Perot gears up

According to a book proposal he's circulating, the former Bush spoiler is positioning himself as a voice to reckon with in 2004 -- and maybe more.

By Micah L. Sifry

Aug 8, 2003 | Is Ross Perot plotting a return to the national stage in time for the 2004 elections? Judging from a well-written 95-page book proposal making its way through the New York publishing circuit, a copy of which arrived unbidden in my e-mail, the crazy aunt in the basement wants to sing again.

For connoisseurs of political entertainment, "America the Broken: How to Reform and Revive the Greatest Democracy Ever Known," which Perot is proposing to coauthor with James Champy, bestselling author of "Reengineering the Corporation," promises everything we miss about ol' jug ears. The "short, intense book" will be "liberally furnished with charts, of the sort Ross Perot used in his 1992 campaign." The "giant sucking sound" of jobs going overseas is back, only this time the bugaboo is white-collar knowledge industry jobs, not manufacturing. There will be stories of how Ross forced Texas educators, kicking and screaming, to reform their public schools, and homilies about solving complicated problems like the healthcare crisis by getting "the best qualified people in the country to put their heads together." And for those of us who always suspected self-interest lay at the root of Perot's prescriptions, his chapter on cutting government waste includes an artfully buried plug from the computer magnate for requiring Washington's myriad agencies to adopt compatible electronic systems.

But should we really just treat Ross as a bad joke? My read of his proposal is that he is serious about addressing the country's economic problems, furious at the GOP's irresponsible tax cuts and anxious to return to the national stage, possibly with some form of grass-roots movement by his side. For anyone who remembers how little respect Perot has shown for the Bush family over the years -- not only did he break Poppy Bush's hold on the White House, in 1994 he went out of his way to publicly endorse the Democratic gubernatorial opponents of both George W. in Texas and Jeb in Florida -- there's an intriguing subtext to all this: Ross may think that by launching this new effort in time for 2004 he can crack the Republican lock on power again, to stop the party's "radical agenda" and prevent a "fiscal disaster."

Perot and Champy's take on the current scene is quite pungent: "The United States loses 100,000 jobs a month. The recession won't go away. The stock market tanks. Great companies cook their books. Airlines fail. Foreign investors pull out. Healthcare doesn't work. Social Security is a mess. The space program is grounded. Homeland security is a jumble. Congress can't agree on a budget. And just as federal tax revenues plunge, leaving states in the lurch, the United States takes on huge new military costs across the planet, swelling an already soaring federal deficit and creating the biggest national debt in world history."

They argue that the great American superpower is in danger of becoming "superpowerless" because Americans have stopped being thrifty and self-reliant and given up on insisting that government effectively manage our common safety and prosperity. It's an argument that some Republicans and political moderates, like Concord Coalition head Pete Peterson and pundit Andrew Sullivan, have been raising as well of late, and may signal the same kind of fissure in the dominant Republican coalition that helped doom the first President Bush in 1992.

But will anyone bother to listen to Perot? After running for president in 1992 as an independent and garnering 19 percent of the vote, he had a brief moment of national prominence. For most of 1993, polls showed him running a close second to newly elected President Bill Clinton, and politicians of both parties rushed to Dallas to seek his support. Nearly 2 million Americans -- a number far larger than MoveOn.org's e-mail list -- became dues-paying members of United We Stand America, Perot's grass-roots lobby.

But it all came crashing down as Perot's paranoia, authoritarianism and sheer mendacity drove his volunteer movement back into the woodwork, a political implosion that disillusioned tens of thousands of public-spirited average citizens and badly damaged efforts to build any kind of independent politics in America. In 1996, Perot's bid to create a new political party devoted to government reform and deficit reduction garnered him only 8 percent of the presidential vote (failures that he conveniently avoids mentioning in the proposal while touting his 1992 success). By 2000, his Reform Party was a hollow, broken shell, abandoned by the angry middle-Americans who had been his base, and squabbled over by followers of Patrick Buchanan, Lenora Fulani, John Hagelin and other fringelets.

Next Page: If he calls, will the thousands who once signed up to work for him follow?

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