(2 of 7)
Make no mistake: Perot, 61, just might (gulp!) be the next President of the U.S. -- a leader unfettered by any party, untested in any office, unclear in his policies and unshakable in the faith that he is right and the entire bipartisan governing establishment is wrong. No independent candidate in 80 years has attracted anything like this kind of support -- and remember, Perot has just barely begun to dip into his personal bank account to spend, as he promises, "whatever it takes to run a proper campaign."
In the TIME poll, Perot draws from both major-party candidates almost equally: 27% of Clinton voters say they would switch to Perot in a three-way race, and 25% of Bush backers say the same. But the who-does-it-hurt-the-most question is fast becoming irrelevant. If he could keep his support through the fall -- the ultimate challenge for an independent candidate feeding on voter protest -- Perot would not be a spoiler but the front runner in the popular vote for President.
Who is Perot anyway? (He uses his full name Henry Ross Perot only to sign checks and never ever the first initial H.) Is he simply what he purports to be: the ultimate straight arrow, the billionaire who never lusted after money, a self-effacing idealist uncontaminated by personal ambition, a brilliant problem solver who never ducked a challenge and a patriotic outsider untouched by the muck of political horse trading? Or is there, as critics claim, a darker side to Perot: thin-skinned, self-righteous, unwilling to compromise and potentially authoritarian? Does Perot, in short, have the right stuff to be President at a time of domestic upheaval, economic unease and global uncertainty? Or does Perot represent the specter of chaos to come, a candidate who will create an Electoral College tangle, a President who will discover that leading the nation bears no resemblance to running a business?
Unlike Bush, Clinton or anyone else who has seriously run for the White House since Dwight Eisenhower, Perot is defined almost entirely by his person rather than by specific issue positions. Asked his views in an April TV interview on the upcoming environmental conference in Rio de Janeiro, Perot gave an answer, both refreshingly candid and alarmingly ill-informed: "I don't know a thing in the world about it." In an appearance on Meet the Press, Perot appeared befuddled as he tried to defend his misguided assertion that $180 billion could be saved by eliminating waste, fraud and abuse in the government. Displaying his petulant side, Perot complained, "This is an interesting game we're playing today. It would have been nice if you would have told me you wanted to talk about this, and I'd have had all my facts with me." Shortly after this hapless performance, Perot announced that he plans to retreat from the spotlight for a while to commune with unnamed policy experts, as if he could acquire ideological direction off the shelf just like a business buying a state-of-the-art computer system.