Ross Perot Talks, Washington Squawks
No matter what happens next, Ross Perot has already done a good day’s work for American democracy. Like a Wall Street arbitrageur raiding a Fortune 500 company, Perot has put the two-party system “in play.” With his Will Rogers wit and twang, Perot has also put the fun –– and suspense –– back in the campaign. With the shrewdness of a great politician, he is articulating the nation’s deepest anxieties and yearnings. His cocky self-confidence is mobilizing millions to engage themselves again in the adventure of self-government.
All that is valuable and a lot more than either George Bush or Bill Clinton has contributed so far. If Perot burns out before November, as Democrats and Republicans are desperately hoping, he will still have altered the fabric of national politics substantially –– both the way that candidates run for office and the way that citizens communicate with those in power. If Perot can dodge the land mines and brickbats, he may accomplish much, much more: His candidacy threatens to break up the old order and open the way for profound change.
As a result, 1992 has become a rare moment in the country’s history –– full of great democratic possibilities. The nation, I suspect, is entering a long period of political disarray, in which the entrenched power relationships surrounding the federal government will be challenged in imaginative new ways and perhaps broken up. The status quo must either reform itself or be replaced. Either way this historic opportunity will require poise and patience (as well as hard work) from the citizens at large. If you want real change in politics, you have to be willing to accept some chaos and uncertainty.
Right now the air is blue with slanderous accusations aimed at decapitating Perot. The governing elites, including the major media, recognize the danger he poses to their own power; they’re hacking away as though the diminutive Texan were a fiery dragon at the castle gates. Perot is a fraudulent outsider, they claim, since as a businessman, he’s done the sort of deal making with political money that offends the public. Perot is a narrow-minded autocrat who will impose his own short-hair morality on the nation. Perot is a commando-style leader who will scrap the Constitution.
The New Republic, which used to idolize Bush and is now a courtier to Clinton, has already upped the ante and invoked the f-word. Ross Perot, it announced solemnly, is an American fascist.
Wow. A home-grown Mussolini from Texarkana? Fortunately, most Americans are smarter than Washington editors and reporters think they are. Everyone (including myself) has lots of unanswered questions about Perot. As he fills in the blanks in the next few months, we may decide that, indeed, he isn’t up to the presidency. In the meantime, most are willing to give the man a little slack and listen to what he has to say.
For now, we know for sure that Perot is a smart character who’s already achieved a serious purpose: His sudden rise confirms the bankruptcy of the status quo. The spontaneous popularity of a Texas billionaire who has never held public office reflects the fact that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are confronting the threatening realities facing the nation and that neither party is genuinely connected to the common experience of ordinary Americans. Perot has already proved something else: The regular order is vulnerable –– vulnerable to an organized insurgency from powerless citizens.
Perot says he does not want the government interfering in the reproductive decisions of his wife or four daughters. He is unequivocally pro-choice on the abortion issue.
Perot declared himself against the war in Iraq while it was underway, not exactly a popular position when 90 percent of the country was cheering. As Clinton endorsed the conflict, Perot denounced it as “a sporting event” in which Bush set out to prove his manhood. “We were programmed to get excited about that war,” Perot told TV Guide recently. “If you look at the careful orchestration of TV during the war –– videotape of smart bombs going down air shafts and so forth –– no pictures of men wounded on the battlefields, no casualties, no media to cover the bodies being brought back to Dover –– this was all very carefully controlled.”
Perot has for years described Reaganomics as a disaster for workers and the economy. He calls deregulation “this silly stuff” that led to such disasters as the S&L bailout. He blames leveraged buyouts for wrecking major U.S. corporations. “The Eighties is the decade that we gave away our industrial lead and acted totally irresponsibly,” he said in 1990.
Perot also opposed Reagan’s war against Nicaragua and refused to contribute to the contras because the conflict was conducted in contempt of constitutional processes. “Some of the private groups have come around to see me, and I said, ‘Look, if we’re going to have a war in this country, Congress has got to make that decision, not private individuals,'” Perot said back in 1986.
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