Let the party begin: like God Almighty himself, Ross Perot isn’t finished with us yet. After months of quiet game-planning, he abruptly invited himself and his 800 number onto CNN’s “Larry King Live” last week to launch the Independence Party. There will be a “convention” next spring in which thousands of voters will be linked by satellite and computers to adopt a party platform and choose their presidential standard-bearer. Perot doesn’t want to be that man, he insisted, but he won’t rule it out. “I love the fact that this is so unorthodox,” he said.
Ever the astute salesman, Perot knows that unorthodox is in. There was plenty of evidence last week. In Washington, an Illinois tire manufacturer named Morry Taylor was touting his quixotic candidacy for the GOP nomination. He’s in the race to stay–and may spend $15 million of his own money. In California, meanwhile, Gov. Pete Wilson–seen as a professional flip-flopper who was little more than the sum of his focus groups–dropped out of the race (page 40).
There was never much chance that 1996 would produce a traditional political campaign. Now there’s none. For months, NEWSWEEK has learned, Perot has been carefully considering in private meetings in Dallas whether to start a new party. Now it’s a go–and, for American politics, there’s no turning back. The mercurial Perot, who once accused Republicans of trying to ruin his daughter’s wedding, may blow up again. Colin Powell, in the end, could decide not to run, but merely walk to the bank to deposit his book profits. Now, however, there’s a vehicle at hand for the most committed, most disenchanted voters–the Perotians–to put a candidate forward. “Perot in effect is guaranteeing that we’ll never return to politics as usual,” said Ralph Reed, executive director of the Christian Coalition. “In fact, there is no ‘politics as usual’.”
In Washington, first reaction to Perot’s announcement was tellingly defensive. Insiders laughed–nervously at times–or dissed him as a has-been jealous that Powell is getting all the anti-political ink. They chuckled at David Letterman’s “Top Ten” list of “Rejected Names for Ross Perot’s New Political Party” (“The Rosstafarians,” “United We’re Nuts”). The new NEWSWEEK Poll shows that voters are indeed dubious about Perot. Half think he wants to start a party primarily to enhance his own influence, and 58 percent say they would not trust him to be president.
America’s favorite third-party candidate isn’t Perot. By the numbers it’s Powell, big time. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 52 percent said they would be “likely” to support Powell if he ran as a third-party nominee, compared with only 27 percent who would back Perot. And in a three-way race against Bill Clinton and Bob Dole, Powell’s numbers have shot up, and he now finishes in a tie with the others. Powell didn’t need surveys to know to keep his distance from Perot. “It’s too early to say anything about Mr. Perot’s idea,” he said on his book tour, “because at the moment it’s an idea.”
Most Beltway calculations focused on how a Perot candidacy might affect Clinton. White House strategists liked the possibility of dividing the anti-Clinton vote in 1996. “We weren’t popping champagne corks, but we weren’t exactly unhappy,” said Ann Lewis, communications director of the Clinton-Gore ‘96 campaign. Publicly, Republicans downplayed Perot’s clout. “There’s a lot less to this than meets the eye,” said GOP Chairman Haley Barbour. “As long as we keep our promises in Congress–on the budget, welfare, Medicare and taxes–he won’t be a factor.” But the private view was less cheerful. “We’re whistling past the graveyard,” said a top GOP insider. “Perot could screw us.”
The NEWSWEEK Poll shows why Barbour and his Republicans should be nervous. If front runner Dole is the GOP nominee, he would lose to Clinton 39-35, with Perot pulling 21 percent–better than his percentage three years ago. The GOP’s best defense against Perot would be . . . Powell. If the retired general were the GOP nominee, the poll shows, Powell (44 percent) would clobber Clinton (81 percent) and Perot (18 percent).
Personal attacks: Even Perot’s worst enemies don’t think his intention is to re-elect Clinton. So what’s he up to? His motivation is a not-so-unorthodox mix of patriotism and pride. Perot says–and his advisers say he genuinely believes–that he could have won outright in 1992. He told NEWSWEEK that a barrage of “propaganda” at the end of that campaign–personal attacks as well as the notion that an independent candidate simply couldn’t win–did him in. This spring, NEWSWEEK has learned, Perot convened a group of advisers in Dallas to discuss whether he should run for the GOP nomination in 1996–or even challenge Clinton in the Democratic primaries. After much debate, he rejected both options.
If lust for the presidency were his motivation, Perot’s supporters contend, the easier route would be to run again as an independent, without a party at all. “He wouldn’t have to bother with all the laborious mechanics of building a new party,” said his son-in-law Clay Mulford, a savvy lawyer and political confidant who is teaching this fall–at Harvard’s Kennedy School. “If you try to establish a new party, you’re going up against all the rules written years ago by the Democrats and Republicans to protect themselves.”
In fact, Perot has long had his eye on a third party. On “Larry King,” Perot’s decision sounded spur of the moment. It was dictated, Perot said, by the need to meet petition deadlines in California this month. But inside the Perot camp, the idea has been discussed since the early days of the GOP revolution in Congress, when Republicans were wooing him and thought they had won his blessing, or at least his neutrality.
Last February, sources tell NEWSWEEK, Mulford invited polltaker Gordon Black to Dallas for an audience with Perot. Black, a proponent of a third party, made a strong pitch, full of charts and numbers about the market for a new force. Perot couldn’t have a truly cleansing effect on politics, Black argued, unless he helped to break the strangle hold of the two-party system.
Perot said “no”–at least for the time being. But Russell Verney, in charge of politics for United We Stand America–Perot’s public-interest organization–and Sharon Holman, Perot’s longtime communications aide, later began suggesting that Black make his pitch to UWSA gatherings in Florida, California and elsewhere. Though they continued to discuss it internally, the Perotians kept talk of the third party very quiet. Last summer they had a reason. Perot had invited the GOP candidates–and top Clinton officials–to Dallas to address a national UWSA meeting. It would have been bad form, Black said, to turn the convention into a forum for attacking the two-party system. But as soon as the event ended, Perot was in touch with Black, assuring him he hadn’t dismissed the third-party idea.
Approaching deadline: Two weeks ago Black was back in Dallas with Tom Golisano, a wealthy businessman who had spent millions of his own money to run for governor of New York last year as an independent. The California petition deadline was approaching, they told Perot. If he didn’t act, Golisano was prepared to bankroll a new party himself. A few days later Perot was on the phone to Black, to tell him what he was going to say on “Larry King.” “Are you happy now?” Perot asked.
The conventional wisdom is that Perot is on a fool’s errand. The arguments are familiar. A third party has never won the presidency, unless it replaced one of the two existing parties altogether. Presidential politics is about personality, not policy. Reforming the “system” is too diffuse a goal to amount to a crusade. “It’ll never materialize,” huffs GOP consultant Mike Murphy.
There’s another problem: if Perot won’t be his party’s candidate, who will? In a recent conversation with his father-in-law, Mulford pointed out that the maverick leaders Perot is seeking would be hard to deal with. They are the kind of figures, Mulford said, who would resist joining someone else’s grand enterprise.
And the radical middle voters perot claims to represent are, by definition, a varied lot. They agree on the need to “get money out of politics” and to balance the budget–but on little else. Their differences were on display last Friday night in San Diego, at Perot’s first new-party rally. There was as much support in the crowd for Pat Buchanan and Jesse Jackson as there was for Powell and Perot. Perot told NEWSWEEK that no candidate could run in the GOP primaries and then seek his party’s nomination–which would seem to rule out Buchanan. Jackson is available and full of praise for Perot’s new party.
Anger remains: But you can go broke underestimating Ross Pe-rot. Like a west Texas wildcatter, Perot has an instinct for tapping gushers of discontent. And the anger remains. Ask Rush Limbaugh–a student of public rage who is no fan of Perot. “To be totally honest, there’s a growing bubble of discontent,” Limbaugh told NEWSWEEK. If a new party is built, according to the NEWSWEEK Poll, voters would like to see it champion precisely the tentative “platform” Perot has sketched out: a ban on “special interest” money in campaigns and lobbying, term limits and a balanced-budget amendment.
Money won’t be a problem. Perot’s top-notch brain trust has carefully examined the thicket of local and federal laws. They think they know what they can and cannot do. They are confident, and probably correct, that Perot can spend as much as he wants to create a party before any limitations kick in–and Perot is worth $3 billion. Last weekend Perot paid to print copies of new-party petitions – 5 million of them – in major California newspapers.
Perot is charging ahead. The crowd at his first stop–San Diego–was smaller than expected. But Perot was elated as he bounded on the stage after “Stars and Stripes Forever.” “Great things happen in a short period of time,” he told the cheering crowd. “God created heaven and earth in just six days.” Americans will settle for a government they can trust.
GETTING ON THE BALLOT
Perot hit California hard last week, hunting the first of hundreds of thousands of signatures he’ll need to put his Independence Party in play across the country in ‘96.
a 50,000-900,000 b 25,000-50,000 c 0-25,000 d No procedure[*]
1995 Oct. 24 California Nov. 20 Ohio Dec. 14 Maine 1996 Jan. 2 Arkansas Utah March 14 Montana April 1 Mississippi April 2 South Dakota April 12 North Dakota April 24 Hawaii May 1 Minnesota Tennessee Wyoming May 5 South Carolina May 21 Arizona May 27 Texas May 31 Oklahoma June 1 Wisconsin Kansas June 30 Louisiana July 1 Massachusetts North Carolina July 9 New Mexico Georgia July 11 Nevada July 16 Florida July 18 Michigan Aug. 1 Nebraska Rhode Island Aug. 5 Maryland Missouri Aug. 6 Alaska Aug. 17 Delaware Aug. 27 Oregon Aug. 31 Idaho Sept. 2 Alabama Sept. 19 Vermont
- STATES THAT REQUIRE A NEW PARTY TO CHOOSE A CANDIDATE BEFORE IT BEGINS TO PETITION TO GET ON THE BALLOT.
