Perot-Noia

Ross Perot likes to punctuate his crisp prescriptions for complex problems by eyeballing the TV camera sternly and intoning, "It's that simple." Yet little about Perot himself matches that terse description. As his bizarre charges of Republican dirty tricks detonated across the political landscape last week, the dominant facet of Perot's makeup became increasingly clear: he is an incurable conspiracy monger who espies plotters in every thicket and easily persuades himself that some of his wildest suspicions are true.

Perot provided ample evidence of his eccentricities as he approached the campaign's last days determined to make a good showing and possibly...