The Ross Perot you don't know

Washington Monthly, May, 1992 by Peter Elkind

"The last thing those students need," he explained at the time, "is anything second-rate." You can almost hear him today saying the same thing about Americans' choices in Campaign 92, a race between men without world-class potential. And in Perot, that notion breeds a powerful temptation. If he thinks he can do better, he's going to try.

Go-Go Perot

In The Go-Go Years, a book about the stock market boom of the sixties, there's a description of Perot's meeting with a group of long-haired West Coast radicals in 1969. When they arrived at the chairman's office, the radicals stated their purpose: Would he fund the Revolution?

Without missing a beat, Perot shot back: "How long will it take, and how much will it cost?"

As that response suggests, Perot is a man without discernible political ideology. Instead, he sees life as a series of puzzles. What is the problem? What is the solution? Who can get the job done? He praised Jesse Jackson for his 1983 mission to Syria to free a captured U.S. flier. He called Mikhail Gorbachev "the most interesting leader alive." He has criticized Reagan and Bush for failing to deal with the budget.

At one time, Perot sought to promote his political opinions the way most businessmen do: through campaign contributions. Now he donates only token amounts to politicians. The political vision he prefers to support is his own.

The 11th-floor headquarters of the Perot Petition Committee-the spontaneous people's crusade-bears the billionaire's unmistakable, high-efficiency mark. The committee, which in March registered with the Federal Election Commission, operates out of the silver-glass North Dallas skyscraper where Perot presides over his empire. Perot is personally bankrolling the committee's space, as well as the cost of a massive phone system manned seven days a week by scores of volunteers.

In the second-floor phone room, binders hold scripts to guide these volunteers. One sample question reads, "Where does Ross Perot stand on the issues?" The answer: "At this point, we're focusing on the petition drive to get Ross Perot on the ballot. His basic character and positions seem to be well known." Well, okay. But what do his business moves, his charitable projects, his personal crusades tell us about Perot as president?

Forget his proposed electronic town meetings and phone systems over which average citizens could offer their solutions to America's problems. Perot finds corporate bureaucracies maddeningly slow; imagine how he would find real participatory democracy. Instead, a Perot presidency would be a stiff dose of medicine, administered with swiftness and the expectation that we would swallow gamely-that we would see as clearly as he does the fundamental rightness of his vision.

In accordance with that vision, he would take on the education lobby, just as he did in Texas. He would raise taxes to reduce the deficit, while the shrewd philanthropist in him would cut social security benefits for those not in need. The antidrug crusader would force millions of federal workers in sensitive jobs to submit to drug testing. And if a defense contractor billed the government for boarding its executives' pets in kennels, the unostentatious Perot would, in his words, "put them under the jail and pour the cement."