Perot gears up
According to a book proposal he's circulating, the former Bush spoiler is positioning himself as a voice to reckon with in 2004 -- and maybe more.
Is Ross Perot plotting a return to the national stage in time for the 2004 elections? Judging from a well-written 95-page book proposal making its way through the New York publishing circuit, a copy of which arrived unbidden in my e-mail, the crazy aunt in the basement wants to sing again.
For connoisseurs of political entertainment, "America the Broken: How to Reform and Revive the Greatest Democracy Ever Known," which Perot is proposing to coauthor with James Champy, bestselling author of "Reengineering the Corporation," promises everything we miss about ol' jug ears. The "short, intense book" will be "liberally furnished with charts, of the sort Ross Perot used in his 1992 campaign." The "giant sucking sound" of jobs going overseas is back, only this time the bugaboo is white-collar knowledge industry jobs, not manufacturing. There will be stories of how Ross forced Texas educators, kicking and screaming, to reform their public schools, and homilies about solving complicated problems like the healthcare crisis by getting "the best qualified people in the country to put their heads together." And for those of us who always suspected self-interest lay at the root of Perot's prescriptions, his chapter on cutting government waste includes an artfully buried plug from the computer magnate for requiring Washington's myriad agencies to adopt compatible electronic systems.
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."
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http://salon.com/news/feature/2003/08/08/perot/index.html
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