The Lessons of Perot

Election '92 may have been God's way of telling Ross Perot he had too much money, but the diminutive Texan with the big ears and the bar charts did win a serious, double-digit share of the vote. The effort cost him more than $60 million -- enough to give even a billionaire pause -- and he failed to carry a single state. Yet along the way, Perot helped focus and energize the race, and provided lessons for future independent candidates, possibly including himself:

1. Money isn't everything. The fact that Perot's candidacy was almost entirely self-financed allowed him to claim he was "owned" by no one but his followers. It turned out there just weren't enough of them to bring him even close to the victory he kept promising. If he had been just another computer salesman from Dallas with a 1930s haircut and a nasal twang, he probably would never have got his name on the ballot, let alone been admitted to the inner circle of candidates. His money -- plus his record as a can-do entrepreneur -- gained him that much. But it's doubtful, given who Perot is and how he chose to run, that any amount of money could have bought him the presidency in 1992.

2. There are no short-cuts. Perot seemed to think all he had to do to win the White House was to grant an occasional interview to Larry King, tape a few commercials and deliver a handful of speeches to captive audiences. To become President, a candidate has to be willing to sweat, to get out of the TV studios and into the streets, to run the entire, terrible gauntlet that presidential campaigns have become. The system by which Americans choose their Presidents may seem irrational and demeaning, with its emphasis on TV and trivia, but no one has yet figured out how to improve on it in this age of weakened political parties. By trying to short-circuit the process, Perot gave the impression that he wasn't really serious.

3. Don't whine. Perot had never before been exposed to the kind of scrutiny that comes with a presidential campaign. By repeatedly charging, without evidence, that Republican dirty tricksters were hatching foul plots against him, he diverted attention from the issues he claimed to want to discuss. His bizarre resurrection of an old story about how the North Vietnamese and the Black Panthers had conspired to kill him back in the '70s also disrupted his campaign, even as it caused people to wonder about his stability. Perot urged the press to check into the behavior of his opponents, but he became petulant when reporters examined his own conduct -- such as his penchant for investigating others and his decision to blow up a protected reef near his Bermuda home. By showing that he couldn't take the heat, Perot convinced most voters that he didn't belong in the kitchen.