RETURN OF THE BOSS
Perot gears up

From an essay by Micah L. Sifry at Salon:

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.

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I’ve hated Ross Perot for many years. His educational “reforms” in Texas during the 1980s still piss me off—his work in this realm gave me my first instinctive distrust of “accountability” as a concept in public schooling. Later, his weird, down home rantings during the 1992 presidential campaign season allowed me to see him for the nut he is. By the time I learned about his crazed allegations of the Viet Cong hiring the Black Panthers to assassinate him during the 60s, I was no longer surprised: Ross Perot is a freak.

Nonetheless, Perot can be a dangerous political player when he puts his mind and money to it—somehow, the American Mussolini has been able to con millions of Americans into buying his bullshit. Forget Nader, Ross the Boss is the undisputed spoiler of this era: his hatred of George H. W. Bush gave Bill Clinton the White House. I cautiously welcome Perot’s return to the political realm.

Cautiously.

Thanks to Tom Tomorrow.

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