TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050492/0504520.000

Text File | 1992-09-10 | 12.3 KB | 248 lines

                                                                                PROFILE, Page 38

The Billionaire Boy Scout


A fellow Texan dissects the appeal of ROSS PEROT, who is
(surprise) funny and (no surprise) very bright. What he still
needs to do is spell out his presidential agenda.

MOLLY IVINS/AUSTIN

    [Molly Ivins, columnist for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram,
is the author of the best-selling Molly Ivins Can't Say That,
Can She? (Random House).]


     Piece of work. H. Ross Perot. He's the best right-wing
populist billionaire we've got in Texas, so if you don't like
him, you're out of luck.

    Everyone wants to know, "Is he serious?" In politics, that
means, "Does he have any money?" Friends, Ross Perot is as
serious as a stroke.

    By and large, Perot has been a good and valuable public
citizen in Texas. He is invaluable when he knows what he's
talking about. No one has plumbed the depths of his ignorance,
but one subject he does know is education, from what's wrong
with teacher training to the most arcane reaches of how to
finance public schools. Ross Perot has been an unalloyed force
for the good. Over the years, he has given enormous sums through
his foundation to educational experiments and improvements,
though no one knows how much because one of the most attractive
things about him is that his philanthropy is usually anonymous.

    His good works range from sending in a SWAT team of tree
experts to try to save Austin's beloved old Treaty Oak after
some nut poisoned it (tree died anyway) to quietly helping the
families of MIAS and other veterans.

    But he has also mounted some damn peculiar crusades. In
the late '70s, he headed up a War on Drugs -- and like everyone
else who has ever done so, he lost. This was in the days when
first-offense possession of any amount of marijuana was a
two-to-life felony in Texas -- wasn't as though you could have
got tougher on drugs. Perhaps his most famous crusade was "Tell
It to Hanoi!," an effort to succor and free the American pows
held by the North Vietnamese in the early 1970s. While Perot
focused the nation's attention on the plight of 1,600 American
prisoners in North Vietnam, Richard Nixon continued to prosecute
the disastrous war in the South, killing millions. "The North
Vietnamese cannot understand how we Americans value the lives
of even a few men," said Perot.

    Perot brought his "Tell It to Hanoi!" campaign to the
Texas state capitol in 1971 on what may still be the single
weirdest day in the history of that peculiar institution. Jets
roared over Austin in "missing man" formation, while beneath the
rotunda, in hour after hour of bloodstained oratory, brows were
darkened and teeth gnashed over the fate of Our Boys. It was a
patriotic orgy, although, as the Texas Observer noted at the
time, no one uttered a peep about exactly what Our Boys were
doing over there when they got caught. One received the
impression that they had been mysteriously kidnapped while
distributing gum to small children; almost all of them were
professional military pilots engaged in the heaviest aerial
bombardment in history.

    "Is there any question what our grandfathers and
great-grandfathers would have done for 1,600 men held prisoner
only a day's ride from Austin?" cried Perot, who then explained
that Hanoi was only 24 hours away by air, and we should saddle
up, ride out and get 'em. He further urged the State of Texas
to deploy a delegation of local leaders to confront the Pathet
Lao and the Viet Cong and to demand the release of Texas POWS.
Our then Governor, known to all as POP Smith, for Poor Ol'
Preston, was intellectually challenged by the task of getting
from the Mansion to the Capitol every day. You could almost hear
the entire legislature gulp at the mind-boggling prospect of POP
Smith debating the Viet Cong.

    Ross Perot is fundamentally a superb salesman. So superb
that it amounts to a form of genius. Over the years, he has
become far more sophisticated in his analysis of political
issues, but he retains the glib salesman's tendency to reduce
complex realities to catchy slogans. In the old days, he
advocated, as a cure for poverty, teaching the Boy Scout Oath
-- to do my best, to do my duty, to God and to my country -- to
every child in the ghetto. Let's face it, it's not sufficient.

    He is still given to the sort of sweeping statements he
made 20 years ago: "Pollution? That's an easy one. No question
about it . . . Give me the choice of having all those industries
dumping pollutants into the rivers or the choice of having no
factories, and I'll have the factories. I can clean up the
rivers in five years."

    This is not a man who has grasped the concept of dead
oceans. American Perot-nistas bear a superficial resemblance to
the Argentine variety. What we have here is a strongman, a
right-wing populist: no party, no program -- just a cult of
personality. All he needs now is an Evita.

    Once when Juan Peron was returning (he was always
returning), the Peronistas stopped cheering after he had passed
by and commenced shooting one another, having nothing in common
other than their allegiance to Peron. One suspects the
Perot-nistas (the coinage is by novelist Peter Tauber) will have
the same problem, though one trusts not as dramatically.

    It's hard to envision a seriously short guy who sounds
like a Chihuahua as a charismatic threat to democracy, but it
is delicious to watch the thrills of horror running through the
Establishment at the mere thought.

    There is always a superficial attraction to the notion of
an outsider coming in to clean up a corrupt, wasteful political
system. "Let's send Ross Perot up there," cries Bubba. "He
knows how to kick ass." Successful "bidnessmen" have been
running for office in Texas for years on that appeal: "Vote for
me; I've met a payroll; I understand the bottom line." We have
been plagued in recent years by rich guys bored with making
boodle who decide to take up public service instead. An entirely
commendable impulse, but why don't they start by running for the
school board or the county commissioners' court? Why do they
always want to buy the governorship or a senatorship? Or, in the
case of Perot, who's richer than God, the presidency? It's
enough to make you yearn for the good old days, when rich guys
just bought racehorses and yachts.

    Because when these rich guys get into office, we find
they're disastrous as political leaders. They're so accustomed
to working in hierarchical, top-down organizations -- where they
can fire anyone who doesn't jump high enough -- they go berserk
with frustration when nobody jumps at all. You can get elected
Governor, but you can't fire the legislature, or even the Egg
Marketing Advisory Board. Our last Big Rich Governor was Bill
Clements, '87 to '91, who, when he tried to learn Spanish,
inspired the observation, "Good, now he'll be bi-ignorant."

    It's a rotten year to try to defend generic politicians,
but the critical political skills -- negotiation, persuasion,
compromise, coalition building, patience and the willingness to
listen to fools more or less gladly -- are still minimal
requirements in public office. The ability to kick ass, one
finds on sad assessment, is not often useful.

    The last master politician we elected to the presidency
was Lyndon Johnson. If you set aside the war in Vietnam (which, I
grant you, is a lot like saying, "If it hadn't've been for the
Hundred Years War, that would've been a swell century"), Johnson
would certainly have gone down in history as one of our greatest
Presidents. (Couldn't have passed a single character test yet
devised, either.) But what L.B.J. did know was how to get the
whole, huge Rube Goldberg contraption we call government to
work. He knew which buttons to push and which levers to press;
he knew what knobs to pull, where to apply oil and when to haul
off and just kick the damn thing in order to get it to crank
around and churn out something that would help people.

    Bush, who was advertised as "Ready on Day One," may or may
not know how to get the machinery of government to work, but
since he clearly has no ideas about what he wants it to do, the
point is moot. Look, we're all desperate for an alternative this
year. Perot is appallingly straight -- he truly is out of Norman
Rockwell by the Boy Scouts -- but that doesn't mean he'd make
a good President. Nor is he without flaw. For one thing, he's
the world's first Welfare Billionaire; he made his gelt by using
computer software developed by the government, and then he
charged the feds handsomely for their own invention. The
closed-door congressional investigation into those charges will
finally get some much belated but long-needed attention. All
that and more will come out if and when he runs.

    In the meantime, you Perot-nistas can console yourselves
with what I believe is a heretofore utterly unreported fact: H.
Ross is a genuinely funny sumbitch. I often teased him in my
old Dallas Times Herald column, reporting outlandish assertions
about his activities. ("H. Ross Perot announced yesterday he had
purchased the Lord God Almighty, the ancient though still
serviceable deity, believed by many to be the Creator of the
Universe.") I once announced to an astonished world that Perot
is a communist, worse, an agent of the Kremlin, on account of he
had attacked the entire foundation of the Texan way of life --
football. Right in front of God and everybody, Ross Perot said
the trouble with Texas schools is too much football.

    Imagine.

    He got into the habit of calling me after these japes to
make semi-droll response: "Yew said in yore column my mind is
only a half an inch wide. Well, all my friends say yore wrong.
They say it's only quarter of an inch." Followed by that
Chihuahua bark of laughter, "Har-har-har."

    Then one day I put into print a glaring error about Perot.
I was holding forth on one of the more devastating imbecilities
of the Reagan era, the abolition of the progressive income tax
in favor of a two-tier flat tax rate. I ended this screed by
observing, "And so you see, if you make more than $17,500 a
year, you will not be in exactly the same tax bracket as H. Ross
Perot." And then, because my high school English teacher taught
me to write balanced sentences, I added, comma, "who makes more
than $1 million a year." I knew Perot was Big Rich and figured
it was a safe assertion, but I did not check. Next day the guys
on our bidness desk in Dallas called, laughing their asses off.
"Ivins," they said (you think I'm making this up, but they spoke
in tandem), "H. Ross Perot makes a million dollars a day."

    Well, kiss my chicken-fried steak. I didn't know Kuwait
made a million dollars a day. I'm settin' there thinkin',
"Damn. This is gonna be an embarrassing correction." Then the
phone rings, and an operator says, nasally, "H. Ross Perot
calling collect for Molly Ivins. Will you accept the charges?"

    I didn't even have the presence of mind to tell the cheap
sumbitch to call back on his own nickel. Perot came on and
poor-mouthed, still soundin' like a Chihuahua -- got fired from
his job at GM, couldn't get his own company back, and here's me
usin' him as an example of some big rich guy; didn't I even read
my own newspaper, etc. It was the funniest gotcha anyone ever
pulled on me.

    But just 'cause this guy is my favorite Texas billionaire
doesn't make him fit to be President. "Gummint" in my home state
has almost always been run by folks who think the purpose of
gummint is to create a healthy bidness climate. The result is
that Texas is Mississippi with good roads. I wouldn't wish that
on the rest of the nation.

    It says right at the top of the Constitution what
government is supposed to do: "Form a more perfect Union,
establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the
common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the
blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity." It doesn't
say anything about the bottom line. Nothing wrong with running
government in a bidnesslike fashion -- that's why you should
appoint some penurious s.o.b. as Secretary of the Treasury. But
we need more from our government than bottom-line thinking. As
that goofy guy from Baja Kennebunkport said, we need some of
this vision thing.