H. Ross Perot, the Man Who Was Eaten by the Media

H.Ross Perot in debate mode, 1992

In the 1992 Presidential campaign both Bill Clinton and George Bush struggled to overcome the spoiler effect of third party candidate, H. Ross Perot, a folksy business tycoon who earned that moniker the way most tycoons do who show up in the political arena—with government contracts. He was fond of making innocent looking presentations with a pointer and a few charts.

And yet, Perot seemed to me at the time to be sensible and confident in his policy presentations, an advantage undermined politically by his eccentric and naïve campaign blunders. He dropped out of the race in July against the advice of his own staffers who were trying to help him react effectively to the usual vague accusations and empty threats of a campaign. He then re-entered in October, with a weirdly reluctant running mate, James Stockdale. A definition of media savvy could be compiled from the options left over when all of Perot’s campaign moves are crossed off the list.

And yet, he won nineteen million votes in the November election, an impressive eighteen percent of the total. His policy positions included increased funding for education, communication, transportation, and he wanted to raise income taxes on wealthy individuals. He just didn’t understand how television could turn small things into a crisis and reduced large things to a blip.

With our current tariff war resurrecting complaints about the 1990’s NAFTA treaty, Ross Perot sound bites have surfaced everywhere, the most popular include his, “giant sucking sound” meme that he predicted would indicate our jobs were going over the border and overseas.

But he was saying more than that.

[If you like the idea of moving] “ your factory south of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire a young twenty-five year old (let's assume you've been in business for a long time and you've got a mature workforce) … have no health care … have no environmental controls, no pollution controls, and no retirement, and you don't care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south. So, if the people send me to Washington, the first thing I'll do is study that two thousand page agreement [NAFTA] and make sure it's a two-way street.”

There are two lines here (in bold) of note. “…and you don’t care about anything but making money…”, adds the unspoken element of greed to the job losses of the past three decades. Perot was willing to call out how NAFTA was not going to allow China to steal jobs. NAFTA was going to allow American factory owners to voluntarily close shop, rid themselves of labor unions (a.k.a. people with families) and reopen where they could make more money paying Chinese workers crap. This is an important distinction in light of how trade is being discussed today as if we have been victimized by our foreign adversaries.

Then there’s Perot’s promise that, “…I’ll study that two thousand page agreement [NAFTA] and make sure it's a two-way street…”

Perot lost, and NAFTA was subsequently not studied carefully enough. Free trade benefited many people around the globe and opened new markets, which was part of its appeal, but screwed too many people here who lost their livelihood and never recovered. Ross Perot had a sense of what the country needed at the time but failed to make a compelling case in the media. He failed to conform to its conventions.

President Trump is a master of the television screen with an uncanny instinct for what will dominate the news. For most of his career in New York his bigger than life media presence hid the bankruptcies and failures of the Trump Organization from the public’s consciousness. His cover was always the New York tabloids and celebrity cameos in movies. Then in 2004, ABC launched The Apprentice, and Trump learned how he could expand his small New York tabloid audience to millions of voters.

He is now President for a second term, and he has a number of very large problems. He must reach his stated goal of lowering the cost of living, creating fair international trade, and winning peace around the world, all with nothing but skills in media manipulation.

His problems are now our problems. International trade, habeas corpus, measles outbreaks, and several wars, none of which respond for too long to spin. I’d be far more comfortable with a President who makes odd little folksy speeches with a pointer and a chart, but knows what he’s doing, than a media master who can make befuddlement and skittishness look brilliant when portrayed on a screen.

H. Ross Perot at work.